The Big Sort: 4 - Bubbling up
Onomichi, Hiroshima
2020.09
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The 8am ferry from Onomichi on a Friday.
I’d arrived in Onomichi the night before, and had gotten up early to rent a rickety yellow bike near the port - the only bike place open before 10am. Breakfast was a chocolate swirl bun from Family Mart that I washed down with a can of bitter black Boss coffee. I boarded the ferry with a herd of teenagers who were all glued to their phones, except for one diligent girl revising for a test with flashcards.
I was riding the Shimanami Kaido to Setoda, where I was consulting for a hotel. We were figuring out how to tell their story. The vision was to create a ryokan-inspired home away from home. But the irony was that I felt so out of place. Hello Imposter syndrome, my old friend.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve started to sit with and increasingly welcome these moments as a chance to trace them back and explore where they might stem from. On this particular day, it brought me back to school.
When I was 13, I hadn’t been doing too well in my English literature classes. It was my weakest subject, so I decided to turn things around for the midterm essay. I stayed up late, printed my draft out 5 times, wrote and edited and rewrote it for days. When we got our papers back, I was chuffed to finally get an A+. The teacher even asked to chat after class.
She asked me who I had copied it from.
The next year we had a different teacher, Mrs Addison. One day, she announced that she had secretly submitted some of our short fiction in a competition. My story was about a blonde girl set in wartime Germany. I had never been to Germany. It ended up getting published in a young writers’ anthology. They handed me a certificate and a copy of the book, which was made with bare minimum production value of printer paper stapled with a gold paper cover. My friends whooped and clapped and stomped when they announced it during assembly.
I have never felt like more of a fraud.
Once in a while, these small, seemingly insignificant memories bubble up decades later so that they can be rewritten, like on this particular day in Onomichi.