November 28 - Origin Story

If I hadn't thumbed through the mid-April 2007 issue of Metropolis magazine and read an article about a band called Shibusashirazu Orchestra, I never would have known about them.
And if I hadn't had my curiosity piqued by the article, I certainly never would have gone to see them live and have my world rocked by the experience.
But I did.
And they immediately became my favorite band. And from then on, it was pretty much automatic: If they were playing in Tokyo I was going.
Just like when they were playing at Shinjuku Pit Inn on December 7, 2007.
Nobody else wanted to go with me that night. None of my friends or co-workers were interested, so I went by myself.
Thank God.
When I arrived, the club hadn't opened yet. The fifteen or so people who already had tickets were waiting in the lobby, and that included me.
That also included the Japanese woman I saw crossing the street who got there at pretty much the same exact time I did.
The one who was also standing alone.
And looking good.
So good, in fact, that I did something very out of character for me. I started a conversation with her.
A few sentences in, she discerned that her English was better than my Japanese, so we switched to English and talked a while and it was cool and casual and natural and laid back, and I was enjoying it and I think she was too.
But then a few minutes later when they started seating people according to the number on their ticket, they called my ticket number before hers and I--idiotically--broke away from my conversation with her and went in.
For some reason, once I started walking away I was powerless to stop. And all the while the part of my brain that is supposed to do the thinking was getting berated by the rest of my brain for walking away from this bright, beautiful, witty, elegant woman who was also into Shibusashirazu Orchestra enough to be there by herself too.
I went in and found a seat and sat there hating myself for being such a bonehead. How did I not just wait until her ticket number was called and go in with her?
Moron.
An overweight American guy took what should have been her seat and we started talking and he was nice but boring and in the middle of our conversation she came in and walked over to the other side of the room and that was that.
Great.
And so I talked to the guy a while longer, but I couldn't concentrate on a word he was saying because She was over there and I wasn't and I was an idiot for letting it come to that in the first place, and so for the second time in 15 minutes I did something out of character. I made up an excuse to go over and talk to her again, and we chatted, and I invited myself to join her, and she accepted. And then I went back over to the American guy, grabbed my bag, and told him I was switching seats. And part of me felt rude for leaving him there on his own, but it ended up being the best decision I ever made because that woman became my wife.
Your mother.
And now almost exactly three years later, here you are. Our daughter.
Sometimes we talk about all the things that had to go right for us to meet each other that night. It's incredible, really. Trains in Tokyo come every few minutes. If either one of us got on any of the trains we took that night five minutes earlier or five minutes later, or missed a crosswalk, or spent three minutes more or three minutes less at work or had a friend who joined us that night or we stopped to tie our shoe or did anything else slightly differently, we might not have gotten there at the same time and met.
But we did.
And now here you are.
Incredible.

For Maya