World Collision!

It felt like Christmas to know that my big sister had at last come all the way from Minnesota and was waiting for me down the street. I spotted her easily and galloped up to her, ready for a week of sisterly laughs. But she looked right through me until I was 25 paces from her, and while she smiled broadly there was something peculiar and incomplete in her hug. She was distracted, digging in her purse for a belated birthday present...she said.

But it wasn't inside her purse at all. It was peering out from behind me, impossibly beautiful: the faces of the two people who taught me to be nice to everyone, and not to swallow my toothpaste, and to use a fork and knife, and who always sounded excited to hear my voice on the phone.

My shrieks in front of Shibuya station were raucous and unabashed. They had seamlessly pulled off the surprise of a lifetime. My ears were ringing, the whole intersection was spinning. The universe had warped into a Möbius strip, twisting and inverting upon itself and I couldn't see the top or bottom.

I held both my parents' hands while the dense population threatened to swallow their airplane-weary bodies. I would do my best to show them an explanation as to why I had chosen to live so far away from them for two years. All the plans I had made in anticipation of my sister's visit suddenly expanded to include these two precious people. I wanted to spoon feed them morsels of seared mackerel and invigorate them with the clean sweetness of plum wine in the depths of a bamboo-partitioned izakaya while yakuza gangsters with scars on their faces smoked cigars with tea-serving geishas playing the shamisen all while taking a hotspring bath inside a bullet train. I would do everything possible to make them love the place I about which I felt so distinctly ambivalent.