Full cycle

The ticket for Okinawa lay on his desk, on top of the closed laptop.
It was early October, and Vix had spent all morning preparing his move, like most mornings for quite some time now.
He'd packed everything he could think of as useful to bring into his new future, and had left the rest in selected piles on the floor.
The piles were getting quite big.
Once in a while he would walk over to the desk, pick up the ticket and read the destination out loud to himself:
“Oki-nawa!”
Then he would smile, and investigate the ticket printout a little.
After he had made the decision about moving on that day before the summer, he had started working very systematically on executing his new plan.
The first thing he had done, was to go and pick up the little red box from the top of the shelf.
The box itself was a simple cardboard construction, and wasn’t really all that red anymore. On top of it, written in weak, worn-out marker-pen greenish grey stood the words:
“Secret Stuff”.
Inside, there were various items of varying importance to Vix. There was a torn one dollar note, an old comic-book, a passport, a pile of stained letters from various official instances, a half-empty packet of chewing gum, a playing-card (the Jack of Spades), and a leather wallet.
Inside the wallet were a series of plastic cards. Most of them for various bonus-programs at stores he’d visited once but hadn’t had the nerve to refuse the offer of joining their bonus program when the cashier had asked, in their robotic part-of-the-job tone.
And then there was the ID for his old bank account.
This account had been with him since before he’d left, and like most of the other luggage from back there, he’d left it untouched and un-thought of since his departure.
Finally it was time to face it, and put it to use.
It wasn’t a question of a bottomless supply, but rather like a decent pension if he put it to modest use.
The ticket reflected such modesty.
He would have to fly via Tokyo. It would take time, but that was fine with him.
He owned time, and anyway he’d read somewhere that because of the Earth’s curves or something, the actual route to Tokyo passed over the North Pole, which he found very exciting. He would try to tune in to check if he could sense anything special when they were near the pole point. You’d never know what could happen.
The last few weeks had been filled with lots of dizzying emotions shifting between tranquility and restlessness fighting hard for his sole attention.
The more he had thought of it, the more he realized how these last few years had just been pointlessly dragging out, and sometimes he would feel very sorry for all the time he’d wasted.
Wasted in the wrong way, that was.
By thinking about these things, he had also discovered that he had forgotten all his motivations for coming here in the first place. Not that it had been the wrong move initially, he didn't have anything to stick around for back where he came from.
Not that he really cared about.
It was just that back then it didn't really matter where he set course. All he knew was that there was no 'home' left, and that he had felt a strange kind of magnetism pulling him towards this city.
This time it was different. This time he had an actual feeling of being on the verge of something new. Genuinely new.
Whatever that was.
For the last three days he had even gone through all his vinyl records, even the ones serving as a base for his bed.
He’d done this quite a few times before, of course, but this time he set out with the intent of actually doing something permanent about it, and not just end up playing old classics into the night, and then going to sleep and waking up in a mess of empty sleeves and stray vinyl all over the floor the next day.
No, this time he had actually gone through the whole pile systematically, put the more or less insignificant ones (about seventy percent it turned out) in crates by the door, to take away to the second-hand store the next day (with intent of parting with them forever).
The interesting ones (the remaining thirty percent), he had played through one after the other, side after side, and then thoughtfully decided if they were real essentials, or if they had to end their relationship with Vix from now on.
The essentials had amounted to about ten percent of the whole collection in the end. “Not bad!” he thought, even though he knew it was.
He had then checked every song on every essential against his library of digital music on the laptop harddrive, and if he could find it there he had put that record in his special boxes for bringing to the small storage space he'd rented for the stuff he would keep. Just in case.
If he couldn't find that he already had the track digitally, he had recorded and catalogued it there and then, before filing the record in a box.
All this had of course taken many hours and numerous mugs of tea to pull off, and when the last record was done, he'd celebrated with a loud playing through of an early nineties techno record he thought was long gone.
This had been around 5 AM, and his neighbour had of course gone completely off his trolley and shouted threats of axing through the wall to behead Vix.
But instead of getting nervous, Vix had started giggling and just let him shout until he ran out of steam.
It had felt nice.
It was as if they were just good old friends with the mere habit of addressing eachother in very noisy and rude ways whenever they communicated. Which wasn’t actually often, as his neighbour usually did the shouting and Vix usually was preoccupied with shutting up.
After this, their last communication, he had felt content with the day – and night’s work, and thrown himself across the mattress on the floor to catch some rest.
And when he woke this morning, he had just continued going through his remaining belongings.
There were masses of stuff on the computer that he had forgotten all about.
He decided to get rid of all this digital junk too, it didn’t really matter if things had any physicality about it or not. He wondered whether Buddhist monks had to include their files and folders when it was time to sum up their seven earthly belongings.
Vix owned a total of 1.322.432 files and folders, which he himself concluded was far too un-Zen, and so he had rearranged his folder system in every category, put a lot of stuff in the trashbin, and then backed up his most essential stuff to an online storage service.
He thought of sorting all his notes, but ended up just collecting all the documents in a folder on the desktop to go through later.
Maybe it would be a good pastime for the plane-journey.
He named the folder "ITS_JUST_LIFE".
After a short tea-break, he finally emptied the sack full of his unpaired socks on the floor, picked out seven matching pairs, and put all the remaining socks back in the sack.
He then carried the whole thing outside, and threw it in the dustbin.
This made him feel indescribably satisfied.
Back inside he sat down by the almost empty desk.
He opened the computer and logged into his blog.
Then he wrote down some words he had found on the back of the sleeve of the rave record from last night’s neighbour-tormenting session.
It read:

The interface between physical manifestation and abstract idea.
As a symbol.
Balanced.
What can the human race learn from the realm of physical law?
What function in it?
Stern reality.
Is there nothing left to chance?
How to match free will with unfree order?
Life lives inbetween.
Life suffers when forced into total control.
Reality collapses when raped by total chaos.
This eternal riddle.
Does it help to try to understand?
Does it help to ignore?
Is the key to translate?
Are we the ones who forgot our place?
The Inbetweeners?
Diplomats?
How can mere humans make peace between the two strongest forces in the Universe?
Is love really balance?
Will we ever get it right?
And left?
Are these the right questions?
Can I shut up and dance?

He uploaded a picture of a sunny beach with a nuclear explosion in the horizon and posted the track "Earthbeat" by PM in the post.
He loved this track. It had traces of a dubstep beat and pace, but sounded strangely harmonic and frankly quite pompous.
It was the kind of cultural fuck-up he always dreamt the real future would hold when he was a teenager, the kind that would give any sci-fi story the authenticity needed to keep up at least his interest in it.
Future acid dub, it was.
He logged into the dubstep forum and located the thread where he initially found the link to the track, and wrote:

Future acid dub!

Strange thing, this 'future' business.
Come to think of it he'd always loved music he considered to be 'futuristic'. But futuristic in the sense of describing the kind of future that never came - the more promising kind of future.
Maybe he loved it because it was the carrot on a stick he needed to keep up his hopes through the darkness?
From old Jamaican dub to New York disco to Italian electronic pop to Detroit techno to German minimalism to London dubstep - in Vix’ mind all of it was music that pointed towards brighter days - even the darker stuff, with its promises of technological superiority.
The stuff that was supposed to save the world.
His harddrive was full of these things, and it made him happy to think that he could carry them all with him inside such a small piece of gear that his laptop was.
At least he wouldn't be lacking entertainment, if that's what he would call music.
Mr. Friend would not have been pleased.
He thought of the old man, and smiled.
So many things had changed so fast.
But it didn't really matter. He had been going around in circles for a long time now. But the circle was about to end. He could tell.
It had gone full cycle.
But where exactly does a circle end, and another one begin?

Okinawa

The winter months had felt lonelier than ever before.
Since the disappearance of Mr. Friend Vix had just fallen into a new kind of psychic coma. The days blurred together and nothing seemed to be important enough to even think about doing.
He knew that this couldn’t go on for much longer.
He’d lost interest in most of the things he used to care about, and the blurry window to the world that was his computer screen gradually lost its transparency as the days passed. Now he could spot his own reflection in the glossy screen more often than he would get transported through it and out into the vast world of digitized information.
The only bookmark he had added during the last few months read: ‘Okinawa’.
It all started when he stumbled upon a travel site by chance, and found himself clicking around on different holiday pictures of scenic views and clear, green waters.
Instantly he had thought of the usual disasters lurking behind such poisoned eye-candy: tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes and the like.
But then he had found one picture, all these thoughts had disappeared, and he found himself strangely at ease just looking at the picture.
Above it, bright red letters spelled out: ‘Okinawa’.
Soon the word would become a magical mantra for Vix.
At any time he felt uneasy, which wasn’t really that often anymore, as he was too indifferent to even feel uneasy at most times. Maybe the feeling was more restlessness than unease when he came to think of it. But anyway, when this feeling of unease turned into restlessness crept in, he would simply say the word ‘Okinawa’, and everything would be OK again.
Although it had become a way out of his waves of restlessness, the magic of saying ‘Okinawa’ only transported him back to the grey, muddy soup that was his daily life, and somehow this wasn’t enough.
He almost missed the fear and panic attacks from the time before that day when he let it all rip and let so much of the fear out of his system.
He didn’t really miss it that much, though.
Around him, it had become summer again without him taking further notice. It only gave him a feeling it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, and that this wasn’t a particularly good realization. Next thing he would know, the winter would do the same, and then he would be really screwed. He knew he couldn’t stand yet another winter in this place.
He had to do something about his situation.
Some major changes had to be made.
And he was up for it.
There was nothing more to lose anymore.
The more he contemplated on this thought, the more euphoric he felt, like a rush building from pure thought and entering his bloodstream.
He got out of his chair and stood in the middle of the room.
Then he said: “Either you follow the rules, or you break the rules.”
He straightened out his back as if to hold a public speech – his first ever - and added: “Or you make the rules!”
Then he went over to the washing basin on the wall, and stood facing the dirty mirror above it.
It was there, in front of the dusty blur of his own reflection, that Vix made up his mind that, before the end of the summer, he would be moving on.
“I am Salmon”, he said out loud to the mirror.
And in that very instant, Vix decided to change his life forever.