Eleven twenty seven. My body thinks it's somewhere over Siberia still. My eyes disagree, wide open, not from excitement exactly, more like they haven't been told to stop yet.
The konbini door makes a sound when I walk in, some cheerful electronic chime, and the woman behind the counter doesn't look up. Fluorescent light so clean it feels like a hospital, or a spaceship, or both. I pick up an onigiri without reading the label properly. Salmon, I think. Maybe plum. There's a can of green tea, unsweetened, cold enough to sweat in my hand before I've even paid.
Outside the glass: neon stacked on neon, a vending machine humming next to a shrine, a man in a suit asleep standing up against a pole. Nobody seems surprised by any of it. Tokyo at this hour has its own grammar and I don't speak it yet. Ainda não.
I eat the onigiri standing at the window counter they've built for exactly this, for people like me who don't know what else to do with themselves. Rice, seaweed, something briny in the middle. The camera stays in the bag. Some moments you don't photograph, you just chew through them, jet lag turning every sound up ten percent too loud.
Someone told me once that the first night in a new city tells you nothing true about the place. I think they're wrong. I think it tells you everything, you're just too tired to understand the language yet.
