Funicular

We're unsure why the Airbnb has 4 bedrooms how Onomishi became a romantic destination and if the city needed a funicular for what could have been a staircase up to this hilltop But the port cranes are bowing their necks to the flushing dunking drunk sun the way I do when sake colors your cheeks and I promise another decade of watching sunsets

Up the mountain's spine we ratchet, two cars roped to the same lie: that one falls so the other may climb. My grandfather rode this to the sanatorium, lungs full of Alpine glass, and waved at the descending car as if waving at himself, younger, going down. The cable hums the only honest note—everything we lift costs us something equal sinking. At the top a café sells postcards of the view I'm in, and I buy one, addressed to the man still rising in me, still believing the rope means up.