I end up on the ground as a result of someone else’s good or bad, probably not too bad, intentions and the angle of the fall lands my left ear square on the surface of the ground in a location 30 degrees clockwise relative to the nearest tall building, 40 degrees from the other medium building and this has nothing well a little no nothing really at all to do with where I intended to place my own body, much less my left ear.

The wrong band is placed, as wrong bands are wont to place themselves, at a distance much further away than my eyes can handle, and it’s not that I’m trying to lay blame or allocate reason or escape something altogether, but who, just who is it that placed me here at this particular moment.

The other side of the intersection waits for me, then starts fidgeting, some of the street signs twitch just a tiny, just the slightest bit, and if I were to arrive at this location called the other side would it be an arrival or an escape or a continuation.

Meanwhile the continuation is taking place via the wrong band which I hear through my unsuspecting left ear where I hear someone stretching a sore muscle, and a throat attenuated after years of clearing itself and clearing itself, and a lawn growing. This lawn makes the most troubling sound of all, as it becomes apparent that it is getting trimmed periodically, that it grows, develops a lovely (to some ears) sound blanket, then gets mowed, with a lovely razor blanket, then grows, developing heat, matures into the sound blanket, until it gets mowed again. I stop a man passing by to ask why it should be so that the sound of lawn growing should trouble me so, but he speaks three different languages that are different from the three different languages that I speak, and he gives up on me altogether and walks off, slapping his left ear as if there was a dangerous bug in the air.

But I already know why, and only wanted the man to say it so that I could hear it from my right ear.

Sawako Nakayasu