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Riding High Into 2025 With a Japanese New Year’s For the Books

It all felt meant to be

Vincent Van Patten
7 min readJan 6, 2025
A torii gate beside the entrance to my neighborhood temple in Nakano, Tokyo. Photo by the author.
A torii gate beside the entrance to my neighborhood temple in Nakano, Tokyo. Photo by the author.

The end of the year has never felt so meaningful, but my life has never looked quite like this. I have my partner, Coco, here with me for my final few months in Tokyo.

Our relationship is unique and new and fuckin’ awesome. Coco and I met at Burning Man in August (find the full Burning Man story at the bottom of the article), spent about a month together in the States, then in November moved in together on the other side of the world.

We knew there would be challenges. Yet the stars aligned too perfectly to let this moment in time slip away. No matter what would happen, it would be an adventure.

Out of the gates, I wanted Coco to glimpse the magic that I’ve found over the past two and a half years while living here, assuming this country would have a similar effect on her.

As the weeks wore on, however, I realized more and more that I couldn’t force it. She’d have to discover her own sort of magic, perhaps drawn from entirely different sources than my own. Our journeys entwine, yet we’re different people, dancing souls.

We won’t experience everything in the same way, and it’s those distinctions that make a relationship dynamic, interesting, able to evolve.

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Vincent Van Patten
Vincent Van Patten

Written by Vincent Van Patten

Exploring what lights my soul on fire while living a nomadic life. vincentvanpatten.com

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