She listens, sees, tastes and gets lost (come on, only sometimes!).

I remember the lights, multicolored lasers pointing at tall buildings, or coming out of publicity signs, golden brand names and giant television screens. A group of young men giggle uncontrollably at something in a Samsung street shop. It takes me a minute to realize they are looking at themselves in a projection screen above the storefront. They distract momentarily from the task at hand, I need to find the temple and Ginza St. seems to go on forever. I accept defeat, I’m lost.

I figure it is okay to be scared sometimes, I feel the tight panic in my chest and uncomfortable ache in my throat. It is my first trip alone, a couple of days prior I left my home and threw myself into busy streets full of people who articulate foreign words, incoherent to me, with street signs that make no sense and money I can't really count; and I didn’t look back.

After a while the fright goes away, I don’t want to look at maps, I just want to walk, touch and smell, not thinking about an itinerary or the blisters burning in my feet.

So I do that. I buy blue grape-flavored fried pastries from a street car my mother would be horrified to see me eat, and I saunter away with newfound excitement. The luxurious constructions dim in height, and start to give away to more modest houses and traditional streets, with black chords and cables hanging from wooden posts and unpolished cement sidewalks. Until I see it, Senso-Ji.

I walk through a wide corridor of a tent market that sells trinkets and memorabilia, with kids running around and women eating out of plastic wrappers, serene and unselfconscious. It doesn't feel like the same street I just walked through, in my head they become mismatched pieces of history that, put together in a land that is not mine, somehow fit just right.

Farther left I see a thin five stories tower, illuminated by golden light, a giant rope sandal by the entrance, a water fountain to wash impurities and past countless stairwells: the temple.

The icy November water chills my fingers and forearms but I do not mind. I walk to the front the temple to make an offering. An old woman dressed in folkloric attire smiles at me and bends her head to look at the ground to walk past me. Entranced, I greet back a little too late, my voice comes raw from the lack of use.

A couple of coins and two deep bows later I climb down the stairs from the red sanctuary, once I cross the bridge back to my epoch I hesitate. And I look back, just for an instant.