Blame it on the dreary weather we’ve been having, but I’ve been as homesick as a recruit in boot camp lately. It’s tempting to blow my meager savings on a ticket back to the States, to see my friends and, yes, even my family.

I miss it all: lazy summer evenings at the zoo, sitting on freshly cut grass and listening to live music; sweaty nights on crowded dance floors in the smoke-filled dives of Old Town; slow Sunday mornings reading the Oregonian over huge American breakfasts; and Bohemian afternoons loafing in cafes in Northwest Portland, sipping demitasses of bitter espresso, the pinky raised.

And my mind must be poisoned by nostalgia, because I don’t think I’d even mind being dragged along to the Sunday morning Mass at St. Cecelia’s. I could check out how the gorgeous Dougherty girls have filled out in my absence, listen again to the nonsensical sermon of our stuttering and apoplectic Father O’Brien, and, afterwards over the doughnuts and coffee, just to get my father’s knickers in a twist tell him what a bunch of crap it all was.

I want to borrow a car and take an aimless drive into the countryside, following the road as far as it will take me and talk with the nutty, loquacious hicks I’m sure to find out there.

I want to drop in at Escape From New York Pizza, stuff my face with greasy slices of pepperoni and wash it all down with a bucket of Dr. Pepper. I’d love to satisfy that craving for the Satyricon gyros that has been with me these sixteen months, to lick the yoghurt sauce as it drips down my forearm. Oh, to be able to sit on a bench outside of the Santa Fe Taqueria and pig out on carne asada burritos stuffed with frijoles, red hot salsa and cilantro, and put the fire out with cans of Tecate.

I long to spend an evening in the Dublin Pub, packed to the Reilly with the Irish Diaspora, to rub elbows with the good Catholic girls and rub up against a not-so-good Protestant one . . . introduce her to “Paddy”:

“Got any Irish in ye?” I’ll say. “No? Would you like some?” (Slap!) “Is that a no?”

I want to belt out Irish folk songs, keeping the throat lubricated with pint after lovely pint of pitch-black Guinness, sing until the bouncer tells me to put a sock in it and gives me the boot.

But, more than anything, I want to stop playing the role of brooding loner that was thrust upon me when I stepped upon the Japanese stage. I yearn to have my friends’ arms around me, to be embraced again by that motley cohort of slackers I parted with when I came to Japan. I’m starving for the conversations we used to have, the conversations inspired by cheap bottles of pinot noir and pints of microbrew that would keep us up all night laughing until our sides hurt and the neighbors got sore, and they could fuck off for all we care, so would you like another drink? All the conversations I’ve had the past several months have left my gut half empty.

Letters from America don’t come as often as they used to, the phone calls have stopped altogether. I worry more and more that I’ve lived for so many months cloistered in this silent vigil, that I am beginning to lose my voice. I feel it in the awkward self-consciousness that overcomes me whenever I talk to someone for the first time, in a new reluctance to break the ice, in the creeping shyness that has its hands around my throat and chokes me where I once sang.

This is an excerpt from A Woman’s Nails. Click here for Chapter One

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A Woman's Nails is now available on Amazon's Kindle.