I will never be able to not admire the glamourous compounds in Roppongi. It makes it even more difficult to not be jealous when I take the school bus with my friend, look out the window and see the urbanizing landscape. It gets worse when my friend and I get off at Harajuku, and Shibuya, the center of Tokyo, the place that takes me two hours and 600 yen to get to. Then when it takes a 15-minute walk to go to their house, which is a flat in an apartment complex, I am finally speechless. I don’t have any words when I walk into their house, look in the living room and find a TV screen as large as the ones in movies theaters. One time, when we were settling down in my friend's room, we heard the bell ring. She opened the door and it was her friend with a giant box of pizza. “Sorry, I thought we could have pizza again like we do every week,” she said. I thought I heard the giant box laughing at me.
“The pizza is ready! Come over here soon before it cools down and gets all mushy!” My mother called. My seven-year-old self took a few tentative steps out of the pool, not wanting to abandon the comfort of the water which I had grown to love since I was born. The cool breeze tickled me and I shivered. I started to sprint across the pool deck like a drenched dog, yearning to be surrounded by the warmness of a white fluffy towel.…show more content… It had never occurred to me then, that maybe the underlying cause for the tension that radiated from her and her snarks behind my back began ever since that day. The day she came over to my house, for a playdate. It had never occurred to me that the pool that was part of my everyday life was a luxury in her eyes. It never occurred to me that my lifestyle would make her feel wistful in any way. From that day forward that to her, I was invisible, a nonexistent human being, who lived in a completely different world that didn’t touch her world