If I want unedited videos I type in 東北大震災, and their number is enormous.

No prefaces, usually, and nauseous camerawork. Some long after the tsunami has pushed inland, as if the dark water had always been there. In one, cut in with the hiss of wind across an unsheltered microphone, an unseen woman’s statement that it is horrible and huge and extreme, that the local elementary school is gone, that the cafe around the corner from her house is gone, that her car is gone, that the scene is terrific and the flotsam immense and that it is dirty. She is on the top floor of a geriatric home. Old faces watch silently. She emphasizes how dirty it is, the water, again and again, how unclean. The image agrees with her. The old men who can stand, stand. Shots of levees over which the ocean tips and crumples, its leading edge pregnant with felled copses and cinderblock and aluminum.

I fall asleep to them. I’m sorry. Some accounts have only ever posted about the catastrophe, first and last video: 2011. Profile-picture-less and simplistic. I watch as many as I can when my boyfriend is gone. I am not ashamed that they make me more comfortable in my uselessness, more resilient to it, even, that I watch them when I am depressed or anxious or tipsy, and that although they do not solve my problems they make the lack of resolution bearable. They make me want to not die, I think. To hate the videos is to miss their raison d’être. Check out that word. Look at its uselessness. These videos, compressed relentlessly, chopped into efficient, clever bitstreams, flooding into me and making my eyes ache and my pulse even and slow, are benign.

Tall documented poisonous columns of smoke from ３号機 and ４号機. Reports that argue over which cores melted and how much, which containment buildings were ruptured by the detonation of accumulated hydrogen gas, which radioisotopes made their way into the sea versus the air, and which among these was most likely to stay in the soil, or the water, or certain organs of the human endocrine system. I learn 甲状腺癌 and ヨウ素１３１. Years of public and semi-public releases debate the long-term consequences of an apparently painless and invisible event. People flee outside red lines that exist on maps but not on the ground, not really, and sales of fresh produce plummet. Ruminants are slaughtered en masse. When I ride the train, even now, swinging laminated signs advertise 福島県 mushrooms and radishes—depict beautiful choice botanical specimens in full color among words of encouragement—and when I see them in the grocery store I pay however much they ask.

The last time my boyfriend returned from a conference he brought a box of cream-filled mochi, each flavored with a seasonal berry from the surrounding forests of the city to which he had travelled. Some had a single berry at their core, tart and small. I reminded him that I had a dairy allergy, but seeing his face when I said this made me apologize instead and I ate a couple of them anyway. He felt bad but I saw that it cheered him, my eating them. And in truth they were delicious. And by the time the dark, deep, cystic acne that milk causes me began to appear, to errupt, he was gone on another trip anyway, and I was able to wear them proudly on errands.

The month is almost over, and it is my birthday on the 29th; my mother named me pragmatically; my name is easy for anyone to pronounce. Here it is a man’s name, at least usually, which I do not mind, though it would be nice if the months here still bore names which were not just the enumeration of their place in the calendrical cycle. It was not always this way, of course, and some of the original names for the months are still given to children who are forever inhered (or trapped) within a season. I hope to meet one some day.

The lunar calendar and the Gregorian calendar do not align, and many of the seasonal events and holidays here are held a month after the ordinal of their month would naïvely imply. When this is not possible, further adjustments are made, temporal shims inserted, and the two systems are superimposed awkwardly and gingerly. Like a teenage couple. These sorts of realities are the ones which make me unsure of other, more complicated processes, and contribute to my watching videos recorded by people who don't articulate that they want to be seen. These people are incredibly sure and unselfconscious in their grief or shock. I am not sure what the true length of a day is, even, neither sidereal nor solar—I keep reading articles about it and my mind refuses to let me understand.

I have tried to explain my unease and its many sources to my boyfriend, and how I want to watch endless unselfconscious self-documentation—to be with someone—and he fails always, though in different ways each time, to understand. He asks me how I could believe I am not with anyone, and when he asks me this it kills me dead, each time.

I want to be with you.

My sister understands me a little better, though she has been quiet this month, sending emails only, and even these only infrequently, and they make me ache too anyway. She was born six years after, but the month before, me, and she got her month’s name. Our mother is tired all of the time. When I feel that I am able, I will send my sister an email about how we might share 皐月 with each other, if we so chose—awkwardly superpose over each other and talk endlessly without thinking—and I would ask her what she thought.