Postcard from Osaka

Elin Gruffydd

Gronw a Lleucu,

You’re both too small, for now, to wrap your beautiful little heads around how big, busy, bizarre and blinding this world can be.

So for now, I’ll do it for you.

Gronw, in your eighteen months, I’ve seen you in precious little pockets of time – short visits and quick hugs all sweetly tucked into busy schedules, in weeks that slip by far too fast.

Lleucu, your due date was meant to be the ninth of October, the day I was flying to Osaka.

In the months before, I kept imagining impossible coincidences: me, suspended somewhere above Asia, while you arrived on Earth.

But you came a month early.

And I got to meet you as a five-day-old baby.

Now, as your parents send photos and videos – Gronw with all the world’s sun in your hair, walking confidently, proudly declaring your latest new word,

And Lleucu with your hundred different gorgeous expressions and tiny sounds,

Cigarettes

I’m a world away: hunting for cigarettes with beautiful packaging,
worrying my film rolls will be ruined by airport x-rays,
drifting, jet lagged, from temples and gardens to neon-lit streets, preparing myself for the next new city.

You both feel so far away.

I’m writing this from the Keitakuen Garden, a rare quiet corner of Osaka where the crows drown out the traffic.

Like your parents, I always look for green spaces – and somehow, they always find me.

When they do, the distance feels smaller, and the quiet existentialism that travelling always brings me fades away.

Three weeks is not a long time for me,
but for you two, it is.

We’re all discovering new worlds at the moment.
One day soon we’ll be discovering them together.

Maybe one day you’ll come to Japan.

And if you do – as your aunt,
I strongly advise you not to buy any cigarettes.

Cariad mawr,

Elin x

Elin Gruffydd is a photographer and writer from north Wales. She is taking part in the Wales Japan cultural exchange in Osaka with the Wales Arts International, British Council Wales and Parthian Books.

Her book Sweet Melancholy was published in June and reviewed on nation.cymru here