They were in a little open air refrigerator at the front of the conbini.
“I saw these on TikTok, they’re good if you’re sick.”
“What are they?”
They were little glass bottles lined up in rows. Most had pictures of lemons on them. They looked like they could be tasty, and vaguely medicinal. I picked one up and deciphered ‘5000mg of Vitamin C’ from the little bits of Katakana I could pick out.
“I guess I’ll get this one, but what’s the difference between these two?”
The one I was holding had a green label with a lemon on it. The other bottle had a blue label with a lemon on it. But I could feel the girls behind me waiting for us to move. They didn’t say anything. They just stood silently there behind us, waiting for us to move of our own volition. I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I walked into the next aisle. They were young, probably around my age, dressed to go out. They both picked up two bottles of the blue label lemon.
‘Dang I wonder why they picked those’ I thought to myself. So I circled back around to translate the labels, this time with my phone, only to decipher something about ‘a drink to reduce swelling caused by alcohol’. ‘Dang I guess they’re gonna get fucked up tonight, I wonder if these actually work’ but I was feeling a little too sick to try it out. I stuck with my green label 5000mg of Vitamin C. Probably better in the moment than a magical hang over cure.
But I couldn’t shake that feeling of them waiting behind me. No すみません, just waiting silently. Even when getting off a crowded train, no すみません, just waiting silently, with maybe a light shove if you were really clueless.
Back home, when I’m in the grocery store, I like to do this thing I’m going to call wading. I’m wading between the people, moving slowly, flowing between the people around me instead of “Excuse me!”-ing my way through. Especially with the mini green carts at Whole Foods with slick bearings, I feel like I’m gliding. Everyone at the grocery store is there for the same reason. We’re all trying to get to that next thing on our shopping list. And it’s America, the land of plenty, no need to run to get the last carton of eggs (although that seems to be different now).
I like the calming slowness of such a hectic society as the big Japanese cities like Osaka and Tokyo. It feels like I’m wading, not just at the grocery store, but everywhere, at the train stations, at the conbini, at the department stores, getting off the train. With maybe ten times the number of people as I ever encountered in New York, where some people won’t even “Excuse me!” as they push past you. But to each their own. Since I’m also the one kicking rats down the street trying to catch the F train.