Soreness

 I have been having some very strange things happening to me over the past year since I began this journey to get to Japan. It really seems to have stricken something visceral in me. I have been reticent about it. I wanted to be sure that I'm not just drunk off of the excitement of a new obsession and passion. I don't want to give off the impression that I'm experiencing some kind of psychosis or appear as someone who is so bored in life that they make up some wild story to escape from their unbearably mundane reality. None of that is true. My life really is not boring. I finally see the signs that it is happening fast now. Things are finally happening now and I have a solid plan. It just feels like it has been waiting for me my whole life. It was only a matter of time. There is a connection - it can be both spiritual and the possibility of having some Japanese in my blood somewhere down the line. It has been ambiguous. Regardless, there has been a connection, something has been pulling me there. I just chose to ignore it thinking I would make another foolish mistake and put a target on myself to be ridiculed. Of course that place would draw someone like me there. The reason I feel like this was an obsession that should have began a long time ago was because there were a number of times I nearly became deeply interested in Japan. Throughout my teens, I have had random obsessions with different places. When I was 13, I wanted to one day move to Egypt(because of the ancient history of course), then I dreamed of living in Germany over the next five years after that. I would want to immerse myself into the culture. I went through the dorkiest phase of my life. I was not a typical high school girl who was boy crazy and into fashion. It was like I was living in another time. I got very excited when Oktoberfest came to town. I charmed a lot of German people I met, but I was also a very strange girl, not in a scary way, just random.

I'm not wanting to get into how I landed with that phase. I have been down many rabbit holes throughout my life. I'm embarrassed to say much about it. After Germany, I became interested in earthquakes and that was what prompted  me to move to California. This time, this is not a phase in which I have fallen into another rabbit hole yet again. I'm too old to be fooling around like that. I have been holding myself back from Japan because it is right up my alley and seems to have all these things I love. I was afraid of people thinking I'm some weeb and didn't want to deal with another Here we go again with you wanting to be somewhere else from my family. I felt guilty, like I was asking for too much or something too big for me to achieve by myself. It goes deeper than it just being a beautiful place that has a lot of things catering to my interests and needs. It also hosts some insecurities and weaknesses for me as well. It brings out an uncomfortable sense of vulnerability. I have been having dreams at night or perhaps astralprojections where I'm in Japan and something ends up happening where I'm unable to move and feel something moving underneath my skin, inside my body. I would see a thin red membrane and hands or appendages infiltrating me. My skin was almost transparent. I wasn't naked, but at one point saw my abdomen exposed and it looked like I had been ripped open and then saw red sores all over my flesh. There was one large red bulging lump on one side of my lower abdomen, in my pelvis. I woke up and later on discovered I had an ovarian cyst. After the first time, I was feeling violated from it. It changed me. It did not matter where I was in those dreams(or where I astralprojected), whether I would be in the forests, a shrine, or perhaps in the center of Tokyo, something would grab me and ravage my insides. It wasn't sexual. It didn't involve orifices. It just went through my skin. I was assuming it came from the ground. It felt like it, like a mass of ghosts or spirits. It feels like it has been making me confront something, not as in punishment, but something familiar that I cannot make out. It sort of feels like a curse that will not resolve until I actually get there. Perhaps it is why or part of why I have been breaking out in ovarian cysts over the past year. It even feels real. I wake up from nights like that feeling tender and sore. I would often wake up in a panic and not fall asleep again.