Six Years Later
Only a few days ago, I'd been thinking about a story from an unusual manga Tokyo Pop had translated. It was a shorter story connecting to a longer one, but it involved a middle-aged woman in an unhappy marriage who gets crushed on by a much younger man. She indulges his interest for a brief chat in a cafe, but still goes back home alone. The next time her husband sees her, he demands a divorce, siting the woman he's been cheating on her with is now pregnant and their marriage was no longer one of love or joy.
The part that really stuck out in my memory happened towards the end. The woman winds up calling the young man looking for comfort, and they meet up at a hotel and sleep together. He's falling quickly in love with her while she tries to distance herself, clearly afraid of him becoming jaded like her husband. He's exuberant in his affection, declaring that he doesn't care what age she is. He finds her beautiful and wants a relationship with her.
It brings her to tears.
Perhaps it's because I find myself in such a similar situation that my weak and foggy memory picked that story from its depths. Now in my thirties, divorced, but currently dating a much younger man who only seems able to smile at my flaws and find beauty where I see none, I felt such a powerful echo of empathy for that woman in the manga than I had when I was in my teens and twenties when I owned the volume.
The volume which had been left behind, along with the vast majority of my book and comics collection and everything else that I hadn't been able to cram into two suitcases and a carry-on, with my ex-husband. I couldn't even remember the name of the manga or who the creator was so there was no sense in searching online for old copies.
And then yesterday, I found it.
My boyfriend is spending the week with me, visiting from his home in Indiana. While his flights haven't been hindered, where I live in the north east has been getting pounded by storms and blizzards. For the second time in as many weeks, we lost power for a 48 hour period. And half way through this last outage, he started going stir-crazy. Trying to think of something two dorks like us would enjoy doing... out... my mind thought of arcades. Only most of our part of Massachusetts was also without power. So I suggested the only other big arcade I knew of three states and a two hour drive away: at the casinos in Connecticut.
During the drive, I was stubbornly avoiding using my GPS. I wanted to TRY and remember the way. So while listening to YouTuber essayists and my boyfriend playing Hearthstone, I let my mind try to recall what was where... and for reasons I cannot fathom, my brain went, "So there's Sarge's Comics just over the bridge..." Everything clicked into place and I remembered exactly how to get to one of the casinos from the highway we were on. Intrigued by my yelp of triumph, Jesse asked what I was thinking and I mentioned the comic book shop that helped trigger the rest of my directional memory.
And then I mentioned how I hadn't been there in years.
"Do you want to go?"
It hadn't been my intention. There wasn't anything I particularly wanted from Sarge's. And there was a little voice in the back of my mind hissing that I'd met my ex-husband playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement of that shop, that he'd included it in his elaborate proposal to me, and this wasn't a place my current boyfriend might want to be associated with. Yet the voice was tiny, drowned out by dim memories of going to Sarge's many, many times without Eric, before Eric, and even a time or two after him. Sarge's wasn't "The Place I Met Eric". It was the place I discovered Runaways and New X-Men, Courtney Crumrin and Earthsong. It was the place with the cats that lived inside its walls who only barely tolerated being pet. Where the owner was super nice and helped transfer foreign DVDs onto localized ones so I could watch them. (A touch illegal, but meh, he got busted on that and wasn't allowed to do it anymore.) This was the place I found Fables, strange and wonderful children's books, and haunting anthologies I'd never heard of. Eric was only a fragment of what Sarge's means to me.
So when Jesse asked, I suddenly found myself grinning and asking if he'd mind if we swung by there first.
I remembered the way more by feel than by signs, though thankfully "New London Waterfront District" was all I needed to reassure myself I was heading the right way. We got parked with little fanfare and made our way over.
I swear the place hasn't changed.
Oh they've moved some stuff around, rearranged where the manga goes, carry lots of the latest and greatest. But there were cardboard cutouts that decorated the upper walls that have been there since the day when I FIRST entered Sarge's. Old enamel pins that have been on sale since the 90's. Racks and shelving units and comic book boxes that have withstood decades. And their manga selection was much the same. You could spot the older volumes right off, their pages yellowed with age and long shelf lives. The Tokyo Pop logos were another sign, standing out against much more current affair from Dark Horse and Yen Press.
And then I saw an oddly familiar lilac-colored spine, one that featured the name of the creator far more prominently than the title.
"No way... no freaking way..."
Erica Sakurazawa was her name, and she'd had a few books... I want to say five or six?... translated and published by Tokyo Pop. I used to own them all, then kept only my favorites. On Sarge's manga shelves were only two, one about a silent angel only certain people could see that I flipped through mostly for nostalgic purposes. The other, The Aromatic Bitters, had the story I'd been thinking of oh so very recently. I couldn't pass it up.
There were other finds as well. I had no idea Sky Doll had received a continuation after YEARS of there being a Volume 1 and ONLY a Volume One. I hadn't been aware that Silk had a new volume out, and I've had Monstress crop up on my radar often enough that I was willing to purchase the first volume in order to give it a proper try. After some help finding it that is. (When I asked, one of the employees zeroed straight in on it where I'd been looking on the wrong side for it.) Despite not buying anything for himself, Jesse was thoroughly amused by how giddy I was at what I'd found, and I even had the pleasant afterglow of maintaining my New Year's promise to only buy physical books from local, small businesses.
And I'd kept out of the basement. That was the one place I just couldn't go.
Yesterday significantly lightened my wallet. Our hunt for a good arcade ended in failure: Mohegan Sun has updated theirs into a very modern arcade full of giant screens and games that are suspiciously simple to play but are a gamble when it comes to winning prizes. (Training them young, eh, Mohegan?) And Foxwood's... is under renovation. Probably to something similar to compete with Mohegan. At the very least I was able to stock up on badly needed sneakers at Foxwood's outlet mall, which houses my closest Easy Spirit location now that the outlet in Dartmouth has closed. -sighs- And there were goodies to be had at Carlo's Bakery (lobster tails!!) and Cake by Franck (MACARONS!!!). Not to mention meals, gas, and a wee bit of gambling for Jesse.
Also a LOT of Pokemon Go playing, but thankfully that's free.
But besides having to be lean on what I buy for the next two weeks or so, I can't really say I have any regrets. I had a delightful time out and about with my boyfriend, got replacements for shoes that are on the verge of giving out, and got to come home to a house with restored power. Yet the highlight has been finding these graphic novels in a comic book shop full of memories, most of them good. Rereading a manga and finding the nuances that I hadn't recognized when I was younger, less experienced. Finding the hope in the final words:
"From now on, I'll be okay no matter what happens. I've been happy up until now, and I will be happy in the future."
The part that really stuck out in my memory happened towards the end. The woman winds up calling the young man looking for comfort, and they meet up at a hotel and sleep together. He's falling quickly in love with her while she tries to distance herself, clearly afraid of him becoming jaded like her husband. He's exuberant in his affection, declaring that he doesn't care what age she is. He finds her beautiful and wants a relationship with her.
It brings her to tears.
Perhaps it's because I find myself in such a similar situation that my weak and foggy memory picked that story from its depths. Now in my thirties, divorced, but currently dating a much younger man who only seems able to smile at my flaws and find beauty where I see none, I felt such a powerful echo of empathy for that woman in the manga than I had when I was in my teens and twenties when I owned the volume.
The volume which had been left behind, along with the vast majority of my book and comics collection and everything else that I hadn't been able to cram into two suitcases and a carry-on, with my ex-husband. I couldn't even remember the name of the manga or who the creator was so there was no sense in searching online for old copies.
And then yesterday, I found it.
My boyfriend is spending the week with me, visiting from his home in Indiana. While his flights haven't been hindered, where I live in the north east has been getting pounded by storms and blizzards. For the second time in as many weeks, we lost power for a 48 hour period. And half way through this last outage, he started going stir-crazy. Trying to think of something two dorks like us would enjoy doing... out... my mind thought of arcades. Only most of our part of Massachusetts was also without power. So I suggested the only other big arcade I knew of three states and a two hour drive away: at the casinos in Connecticut.
During the drive, I was stubbornly avoiding using my GPS. I wanted to TRY and remember the way. So while listening to YouTuber essayists and my boyfriend playing Hearthstone, I let my mind try to recall what was where... and for reasons I cannot fathom, my brain went, "So there's Sarge's Comics just over the bridge..." Everything clicked into place and I remembered exactly how to get to one of the casinos from the highway we were on. Intrigued by my yelp of triumph, Jesse asked what I was thinking and I mentioned the comic book shop that helped trigger the rest of my directional memory.
And then I mentioned how I hadn't been there in years.
"Do you want to go?"
It hadn't been my intention. There wasn't anything I particularly wanted from Sarge's. And there was a little voice in the back of my mind hissing that I'd met my ex-husband playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement of that shop, that he'd included it in his elaborate proposal to me, and this wasn't a place my current boyfriend might want to be associated with. Yet the voice was tiny, drowned out by dim memories of going to Sarge's many, many times without Eric, before Eric, and even a time or two after him. Sarge's wasn't "The Place I Met Eric". It was the place I discovered Runaways and New X-Men, Courtney Crumrin and Earthsong. It was the place with the cats that lived inside its walls who only barely tolerated being pet. Where the owner was super nice and helped transfer foreign DVDs onto localized ones so I could watch them. (A touch illegal, but meh, he got busted on that and wasn't allowed to do it anymore.) This was the place I found Fables, strange and wonderful children's books, and haunting anthologies I'd never heard of. Eric was only a fragment of what Sarge's means to me.
So when Jesse asked, I suddenly found myself grinning and asking if he'd mind if we swung by there first.
I remembered the way more by feel than by signs, though thankfully "New London Waterfront District" was all I needed to reassure myself I was heading the right way. We got parked with little fanfare and made our way over.
I swear the place hasn't changed.
Oh they've moved some stuff around, rearranged where the manga goes, carry lots of the latest and greatest. But there were cardboard cutouts that decorated the upper walls that have been there since the day when I FIRST entered Sarge's. Old enamel pins that have been on sale since the 90's. Racks and shelving units and comic book boxes that have withstood decades. And their manga selection was much the same. You could spot the older volumes right off, their pages yellowed with age and long shelf lives. The Tokyo Pop logos were another sign, standing out against much more current affair from Dark Horse and Yen Press.
And then I saw an oddly familiar lilac-colored spine, one that featured the name of the creator far more prominently than the title.
"No way... no freaking way..."
Erica Sakurazawa was her name, and she'd had a few books... I want to say five or six?... translated and published by Tokyo Pop. I used to own them all, then kept only my favorites. On Sarge's manga shelves were only two, one about a silent angel only certain people could see that I flipped through mostly for nostalgic purposes. The other, The Aromatic Bitters, had the story I'd been thinking of oh so very recently. I couldn't pass it up.
There were other finds as well. I had no idea Sky Doll had received a continuation after YEARS of there being a Volume 1 and ONLY a Volume One. I hadn't been aware that Silk had a new volume out, and I've had Monstress crop up on my radar often enough that I was willing to purchase the first volume in order to give it a proper try. After some help finding it that is. (When I asked, one of the employees zeroed straight in on it where I'd been looking on the wrong side for it.) Despite not buying anything for himself, Jesse was thoroughly amused by how giddy I was at what I'd found, and I even had the pleasant afterglow of maintaining my New Year's promise to only buy physical books from local, small businesses.
And I'd kept out of the basement. That was the one place I just couldn't go.
Yesterday significantly lightened my wallet. Our hunt for a good arcade ended in failure: Mohegan Sun has updated theirs into a very modern arcade full of giant screens and games that are suspiciously simple to play but are a gamble when it comes to winning prizes. (Training them young, eh, Mohegan?) And Foxwood's... is under renovation. Probably to something similar to compete with Mohegan. At the very least I was able to stock up on badly needed sneakers at Foxwood's outlet mall, which houses my closest Easy Spirit location now that the outlet in Dartmouth has closed. -sighs- And there were goodies to be had at Carlo's Bakery (lobster tails!!) and Cake by Franck (MACARONS!!!). Not to mention meals, gas, and a wee bit of gambling for Jesse.
Also a LOT of Pokemon Go playing, but thankfully that's free.
But besides having to be lean on what I buy for the next two weeks or so, I can't really say I have any regrets. I had a delightful time out and about with my boyfriend, got replacements for shoes that are on the verge of giving out, and got to come home to a house with restored power. Yet the highlight has been finding these graphic novels in a comic book shop full of memories, most of them good. Rereading a manga and finding the nuances that I hadn't recognized when I was younger, less experienced. Finding the hope in the final words:
"From now on, I'll be okay no matter what happens. I've been happy up until now, and I will be happy in the future."