LOST IN TOKYO

 

The other night I had a singular dream: I was in Tokyo, and I was lost. I did not remember the name of the hotel where I was staying with my partner, and the streets I walked were unfamiliar to me. Suddenly, I saw a woman doing repairs on a ladder and asked her for help; she immediately got down and started walking with me through the nearby streets to see if I could locate myself. So the hours went by, and I was more lost than ever, until the woman told me that she could no longer do anything for me. The thought of my partner crossed my mind, and I told myself that he was surely wondering about me. Desperate, I continued walking through that unknown city until, in an open house, I heard a boy speak in Spanish with an Argentine accent. I hurried over to him and told him that my hotel was near a large fish market, and asked him if he knew of one. He didn’t and suggested that I go to the Argentine consulate in Tokyo; he would take me there. Luckily he didn't have to since, at that precise moment, I woke up.  Upon awakening, I felt an intense feeling of relief. Needless to say, one thing is to get lost in Rome and another in Tokyo. But what is the meaning of this strange dream? I asked myself. Although I was in Tokyo many years ago, it is not a city that lingers in my thoughts and I don't feel like visiting it again. To me, getting lost in an unfamiliar city is almost the same as being alone in the city in which we live, but that is not our city. It is a city that is not familiar to our soul. As the years go by, our feelings and our gaze turn to our beginnings: the house where we lived, the school we attended, and those friends who participated in our first years of life as if they were our siblings. But above all we remember the city where we were born: its cobbled streets, its lilac jacaranda trees, its cafes always open, and its multicolored buses. It is with deep nostalgia that we recall the place where our existence began. With the dream I understood that, when I left that city, I left the warmth of my family’s house to start my own journey. I also understood that we come to this earth to become who we really are, and we must do so without help. That is why not even the figure on the ladder managed to give me a hand.