Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be compatible with someone as a person. I’m generally the kind of person who can get along with almost anyone. But I also think there is a separate question of whether or not I truly click with someone. If I had to draw the line myself, I would say that getting along with someone means being able to maintain a relationship with them, while truly clicking with someone means being able to be myself without forcing anything. When I think about what it means to be myself without forcing anything, it looks something like this: - I don’t spend too much time after meeting them wondering, “Did I say something weird?” - I don’t have to adjust my opinions to match what I think they would like to hear. - Even when we disagree, it doesn’t feel as though the relationship itself might fall apart. - I don’t feel pressured to say something funny or keep the conversation going. For me, how much I do these things seems to vary quite a lot depending on the person. None of them are necessarily bad. When I meet someone for the first time, or when I still don’t know them very well, these things almost always happen. But with someone I truly click with, those walls tend to come down quickly, and I gradually become able to be myself without trying so hard. With many people, however, those walls remain no matter how many times we meet. Of course, the more easily you can get along with anyone, the harder it may be to distinguish between “I don’t dislike this person,” “I can get along with this person without any problems,” and “I genuinely click with this person.” Still, this is how I define compatibility for myself. I also think the biggest key to reaching this kind of relationship is whether our smiles and sense of when to laugh are in sync. More broadly, it comes down to the way someone listens. When I’m talking to someone who only laughs when something is genuinely funny, I find myself pausing for a moment before saying anything. If that happens in every conversation, it becomes exhausting. It creates a negative cycle: I become less comfortable saying what I really want to say, and as a result, the other person probably becomes less comfortable too. That doesn’t mean someone has to smile constantly or laugh at everything. It is simply about the way they listen. When someone smiles, I find it easier to talk to them. I relax, and I gradually feel able to say whatever is on my mind. So perhaps the people I truly click with are the ones who can laugh even at the silly, unremarkable things I say.

I spent the whole day at a tennis tournament. I went with two friends I met at tennis school. We played singles matches in the morning and doubles in the afternoon. There is something interesting about making friends in a place completely separate from work and the rest of my usual world. One of them is moving to Australia next year and also has a fascinating job. He always has so many stories about things I know nothing about, which makes talking to him really interesting. The other has a job completely different from mine, and his lifestyle and interests are also very different from my own. That makes spending time with him interesting too. One of the main reasons I started playing tennis six months ago was the chance to meet people like this, so I’m really happy that it has actually happened. Starting next week, I’m planning to skip tennis school and rent a court with them once or twice a week after work instead. By the way, I got absolutely destroyed in my matches.

It has been a year since I started writing this diary. I’ve never been very good at sticking with things, so I’m honestly surprised that I’ve managed to keep this diary going for a whole year. I wrote 57 entries over the past year, which works out to about one or two entries a week. That doesn’t sound like much when I put it that way, but I still think it’s pretty great that I kept going. I started thinking about why I’ve been able to continue. Writing here feels a little like telling my family or friends, “Hey, this happened to me the other day!” It feels as though someone is listening to me. Because of that, even the things I would normally keep bottled up inside come out in words as if I were talking to someone, and I feel a little lighter after I finish writing. I think this diary has become both an outlet for stress and a kind of emotional support—a place where I can share the things that happen in my life, almost as if I were talking to someone close to me. In the past, I tried writing in planners and diary apps that only I could see, but I could never keep it up. So I think my strategy of publishing my diary online has worked. The format of one photo plus some writing has worked well too. It makes me want to capture things in photos more often, and looking back at them later is interesting. Most of the photos are just ordinary scenes from everyday life. But when I look at the same place a year later, it somehow looks different, even though physically, nothing may have changed at all. Maybe it’s because the combination of the photo and the words gives the scene a small meaning of its own. Even when the place itself is exactly the same, it looks different to me a year later. I find that really interesting. Sometimes, before taking a photo, I even wonder how I’ll see it several years from now. Since I started writing this diary, I feel like the way I go through everyday life has changed, just a little. So, to sum up everything I just said: I’m pretty amazing for somehow managing to lazily keep this diary going for a whole year.

Recently, I found a nice park near my place. There’s a playground structure shaped like a hill, covered with slides—enough for about ten people to slide down at the same time. It feels really nice to lie flat on my back with my arms and legs spread out in the middle of it. It makes me feel like I have the whole park to myself. On a bench near the slides, there’s almost always a cat pretending not to look at me while definitely keeping an eye on me. Going there clears my head and feels really good. But since I usually go after work when it’s already dark, for some reason I always feel a little negative on the way home. Maybe I start imagining myself as the main character in a movie who has just suffered some kind of setback and is sitting alone in a park, lost in thought. Then I get a little too into the role. As I walk home, part of me also thinks I’m being kind of weird and cringey. Anyway, I came home feeling sad, so I wrote this diary entry. I feel a little better now.

I’m starting to feel like traveling abroad again. I’ve always been a little stingy, so whenever I think about traveling, I look at how much money I have saved and sometimes hesitate to spend it. That’s exactly how I feel right now. Depending on the destination, a round-trip flight can cost around 100,000 yen. Then I start thinking, “I could buy a computer with that!” or “I could get a really nice bicycle!” That way of thinking sometimes stops me from traveling abroad. I’ve felt this way before, but traveling has always been worth the money. I’ve been to a few countries, including Mongolia, Australia, and Cambodia. Whenever I travel, I feel as if everything has been refreshed. Going to another country takes me away from what is considered normal in Japan. The things I was worried about back home suddenly seem small, so I can escape from reality for a while and feel as if something inside me has been reset. (Even though nothing has actually been reset.) To put it dramatically, traveling makes me feel like saying, “All right, it’s time to start the next chapter of my life!” (Although, in the end, my life never changes enough to truly feel like a new chapter has begun.) I love traveling abroad because it gives me that feeling of refreshment, and lately, I’ve been wanting to experience it again. My last trip abroad was to Mongolia a year ago, and before that, I went to Australia two years ago. I’d like to travel abroad about once a year. Speaking of Mongolia, I spent seven or eight days traveling with people from several different countries. A few days ago, one of the friends I met there sent me a message on Instagram. During our trip, she had been taking photos with a film camera. She recently had the film developed and found a few photos of me, so she sent them to me. I thought there was something really special about that. The photos were taken a year ago, but only recently were they developed, turned into something we could actually see, and shared with me. One of those photos is the photo I used for this diary entry. It shows me sitting alone in the Mongolian grasslands early in the morning, quietly staring into the distance and doing nothing in particular. I was quite far away from my friends at the time, so I had no idea that someone had taken a photo of me. Finding out a year later that she had secretly captured that moment was a real surprise. For an entire year, those memories existed without us knowing what they would look like. Now, they have finally taken shape. Seeing the photos brought those wonderful memories back to life and made them feel even more special. Seeing those photos made me appreciate film cameras even more, and being reminded of how much fun I had in Mongolia made me want to travel again. Those feelings are what inspired me to write about traveling today.