I gave myself a trip to a 銭湯 in the southwestern part of the city—the heated water was mixed with salts imported from 道後温泉 in 松山, which is among the oldest known in Japan; they said this on their website, which I checked to see their hours. The early afternoon visitors were almost solely older men and women, all of whom brought their own personalized towels, while I had to rent mine from the front desk. It was small and pink. The genders split at draped slashed curtains cutting left and right deep in the center of the wooden building—such separation is standard at all but the oldest and most remote 銭湯 and 温泉, I’ve heard. During the late nineteenth century the government began to impose certain hand-selected European norms, and so now, over one hundred years later, I sit in a small wooded room with a recessed stone floor, spigots from the walls bringing in new, steaming, greenish, mineralic water, among the women who spend their Tuesdays immersed, eyes closed, custom colorful towels balanced on their heads. I stay until I feel like a gently poached shellfish.

I don’t fear aging. Not concretely, anyway: its physical details and embarrassments. While I can logically believe that my skin with lose its elasticity, that the lenses in my eyes will harden and cloud, that my spine will find a new shape, I can’t maintain this belief for long stretches, or more precisely project myself onto and live within this future. I forget. It's that simple. I get pulled back here, surprised by my own fascination with the texture of my current crises. Because of this inability I worry that I am an unimaginative person, or a vain person, or an uncaring person—if I cannot really imagine that one day I will be old, how must this affect my ability to empathize with the other bathers? I hear that old age is a dimming of everything–like peering through broken blinds. I have to try so hard to keep consequences in view. And then there is my worry that this lack of creativity in imagining my future self contributes to a reciprocal and paradoxical excess of creativity in imagining my own death, in how I will avoid age, the reason behind which must somehow relate to death’s association with stasis, my own perception of my own stasis or entrapment or self-induced repetition. Ghosts must hate to haunt people; they must get so bored of it. I imagine being forced to haunt must contain within it the same cheap styrofoam core that masturbation conceals.

Anachronistic plastic signs warned bathers not to spend more than forty-five minutes immersed without taking a break outside of the water. Later in the day I will look up the mirrored medical terms of 低体温 and 高体温, and whether there have been any recorded cases of the latter recently in the 銭湯 of this city. Where do they keep this data? I am interested in interviews though, not just autopsy certificates. Do the other old people notice that someone is not waking up, or is it the closing staff that has to call emergency services? I have heard that mountain climbers whose core temperature drops feel euphoric while in multi-organ failure, though the same cannot be true for the opposite extreme, I think. Heat brings delirium and nausea. But then how does it look? On the plastic sign, in addition to the bold red type, is a small cartoon of a reclining man with fever lines rising from his forehead and an exaggerated drop of sweat waiting to fall from his temple.

Besides signs there are wide wooden basins where people bathe before entering the water, and spray-heads attached to flexible metal hoses screwed onto spigots in the wall. There are decorative tiles where the wall meets the floor and rot-resistant wood accents, maybe teak, near the doorways which have, in their age, acquired an almost black, lacquered finish.

This is the first birthday I’ve had where no one has texted me, but I am calm. But there is no disaster. I water my monstera plant and add julienned 福島県 mushrooms from the supermarket to my prepackaged noodles. They simmer and pop. Their flavor is strong and excellent. I wonder if my boyfriend is okay—that he might feel so guilty for not being here that he cannot say a thing to me, not even over text—but then I stop. And I ask myself how someone knows that they care deeply about someone, and if such care can be inferred from being upset at the possibility, or reality, of someone's absence. I think I am just upset at the inconvenience of it.

For dessert I bought myself a 鯛焼き from Seven Eleven and ate it out on my balcony, careful to prevent the ice cream from squidging out. These pastries are also popular in Korea, where they are carp-shaped instead of bream-shaped, and are a reminder of the colonial period. In its head was a tablespoon of 粒あん, and I rolled the bean grains around my mouth with my tongue. The temperature of the night is high now but the water has gone out of the air. And I can still smell the vanilla on my fingers.

Happy birthday to me.