Waking from a winter’s sleep, I remembered why I wanted to come to the island. The clear, bright skies showed me a mix of verdant woods and dried orange trees. I drank a Sheego green energy drink as I went down from the North back to Izuhara. The roads curve and bend as they snake through the narrow avenues between coastal mountains. I don’t pass many cars during my drive. The forests are left vacant as I drive past. Weathered shrines sit on the road— little pockets of peace for anyone in need of prayer. I’ve stopped at many throughout the island.

I listened to my top songs from 2020, and the lyrics from “The Stranger” by Miki Fiki stood out as I felt the fire of potential reawaken. The scent of the air harkens back to livelier, rose-colored moments. I’m thrown back to a vision of driving my 1998 claret Ford Escort wagon to Wilshire park as I raced to beat my players to the practice field. It was 2015, and I was using my national coaching license I had gotten at eighteen but had yet to use. I overprepared. I spent hours at my parent’s kitchen table as I pored over practice plans and educational material. I was scared to death of coaching— I didn’t want to fuck it up. I didn’t want to give my players anything less than the best I could offer.

Those same nerves found me the night before I flew to Japan. I had some final parting beers with Julius and found sleep wouldn’t find me before my alarm rang. I got out of bed at 2 am shaking. My gut churned like a nonna’s stew pot. I was finally leaving— The thing I had aimed for was finally lined up—this grand adventure. I wanted to puke. That might have been the craft beers and lack of sleep rather than nerves.

That was six months ago. Six months in which I’ve gone from the ecstasy of adventure to lonely resentment— before arriving at the beginning of settled contentment.

Parts of the island feel comfortable to me now. I know how the wind will blow, and the kites will fly as I pass through their territory.

My only regret has been the lack of people to share the island's natural wonder. This place is beautiful in a way that my pictures and, much less, words fail to describe. There’s a beauty to the derelict buildings that are all that remain from fishing outposts during a more prosperous time.

The population has plummeted in the past few decades. At its height, Tsushima had nearly seventy thousand residents. Now it’s lucky to say it has twenty-five thousand. But where humanity has left— the flora and fauna have retaken. There’s a majesty to the swell of avian predators— the black kites. I’ve never seen so many raptors in one place in my entire life. On the day before I saw the pod of dolphins along road 24, I saw ten black kites sitting in a row on the fence posts across from the abandoned school in Komodohama. It felt like the beginning of a dream or a touch of destiny that’s forgotten before the flow of life recaptures you.

It’s as though time has forgotten certain parts of the island—where people still dwell on the outskirts between the “big” towns. Some ancestral homes bear shining ceramic seals from the top of the roof despite the worn bones of the structure. Others are broken shacks in the middle of slow vivisection by the creeping vines. Small, dusty riverbeds run next to the healthy farms that show the care of effort and press of time upon the callused hands that work them.

It’s not uncommon to see an old man march down the empty two-lane highways or an old woman on her bike doing the same. Occasionally a runner will pop up on the mountain roads clad in athletic gear and striding along swiftly. They glide across the pavement— ghosts of a future I wonder the island will ever see.

I am changing, I think, as I stared at a tori gate sitting before the steps up to a shrine on a small island in the western bay. I wonder how I’d be able to get to the island— it must only be accessible by boat. I wonder how many people have been there recently or even know of it. I find myself wandering in and out of legends as I traverse this last extension of Japan before hitting the mainland. I wonder how the creeping vines and soaring kites will live in my memories, how the stories of kingdoms long past and traditions at the edge of fading will burn in the heart of my hearts when I, too, wander along the highways of life as an old man.