home and back
I was home for Christmas this year. It was the first time I’ve been home since coming to Japan a year and a half ago. Since I bought my tickets I had been awaiting this trip anxiously. I was excited to go home, and nervous that somehow I might have gotten old, or that too much would have changed.
Well, my excitement was justified. Really, it was a great visit, I saw everyone I could have possibly hoped to see, harrassed my kitties, did everything I wanted to, people said I looked good, my Japan haircut did its mullety best not to be so mullet-like. Even the weather was nice.
It was, SO much better than last year’s tension-filled visit/insertion into the European half of my family, I don’t know why I didn’t go home last year instead. Well, actually I do. See, I thought I was all sophisticated and independent, and not the type of person who got homesick. I figured out, academically, there was no real reason to miss a little town in the Midwesty Midwest full of some memories I don’t exactly cherish and grey days that get me down. I thought I had broken the ties.
But I guess I thought wrong. Actually, in retrospect it probably would have helped some of the angst and Japan-hating of last summer, evidenced by my raging posts, if I had gone home sooner. When my friends left town last summer and I was bored, it turned to lonliness and something I didn’t diagnose which was probably plain old homesickness. A little hard to admit, after all the hard work earning my seasoned-traveler badge.
I still rebel inwardly at the thought that I might end up stuck there, in a town my parents chose for me. But for better or worse, a part of my heart must still call it home because I rested a little easier, feeling it around me.
Well, enough mush. I’m back in Japan and back at work, and it’s been a good week. Seeing bits of Japan all over again, like the insane multi-bagging of different types of groceries by the check-out clerks. The absolute luxury of the onsen, how could I ever have taken it for granted? The smiling politeness of the women at the airport whose job it is just to make sure you get on the right bus.
How Japanese people just take up less space, somehow, in a room full of egos. It’s nice to be back.
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