We Shall Call this "The First Try".

I understand now that there is so much about this experience and its aftershocks that I could never fully know or take into account. How could I ever have anticipated the consummate loneliness; the ache that permeates my mundane, everyday tasks? Wash my face—miss Japan. Clean the kitchen—miss Japan. Think about Japan—miss Japan. And on it goes. There is nearly nothing these days that doesn’t make me think about Japan and the life there that I left behind.

I spoke to Katie today. Katie in Hong Kong, owner of Sumi the ink stained cat. Katie has been one year gone from Yatsushiro, having left when I began my second year. She has a job with a Japanese fashion brand based in Hong Kong. She is settled and for all intents and purposes, successful. And yet for all that, she is still forever stuck in Yatsushiro, her heart always wandering the bike path by our apartments, forever yearning to have that simple life when we were all together, when we were all any of us could need.

During the waning days of my second year, when I thought that I wanted nothing more than to make it out of Japan with my sanity intact, Katie came to visit. She was wistful, caught up in remembrances of her life lived across the parking lot from my place. We talked about so many things like: her students and their penchant for speaking about masturbation to her; the time she dressed like tofu for the ALT Halloween party; the night we drunkenly rode our bikes home from karaoke and narrowly avoided falling into a rice paddy; and the time when we drew a magnificent picture of Godzilla for the poster that would greet the newbies at the airport.

I always felt that Katie loved Japan more then I was ever capable of. The things that I could never quite bear never seemed to bother her. She always liked the job more than I could. She was always happy, while I spent much more time focused on the unique failures of Japanese society and what it did to the people born to the country. I somehow felt that when I left, I would not feel the same sense of longing that she did. I felt like I would be lucky.

But now, after being back for a mere 2 months, I see that I was wrong. While I am glad to be back, glad to have seen friends I missed so dearly for 2 years; glad to hug my family and tell them to their faces how much I love them; glad to have moved to Texas and married my Guy, it doesn’t change the fact that at least once a day I think,

“I wish I had stayed just one more year. Just one more.”

There has not been a night—not a single damn night—in these 2 months when I haven’t closed my eyes to sleep and seen, so painfully clear, the meandering streets of Yatsushiro. Every night, I stroll past Shan Shan, the takoyaki place next to our apartments that was always overflowing with high school students who would openly gawk at our foreignness when given the chance and on down the street past the KFC with the life sized statue of the Colonel that sat right next to the headquarters of a religious cult/political party; on down to the Lawson’s that was owned by my kindly Japanese grandmother who would pack my bags with free lighters and who wrote me a letter expressing her happiness at having known me before I left. Farther still I see the Tsutaya and the adorable guy that would always smile so shyly at me when I rented my movies. I can see the special needs school I worked at, nestled at the foot of an island that had been reclaimed from the sea generations ago. I can see the sea wall and beyond, where the fishing boats would stick in the mud when the tide went out to places unknown.

And beyond all of that, I am haunted by the people I have left behind. My dear Javier—my platonic soul mate—as much a part of me as my own limbs, his smile always a bright point on the horizon of my memory. Ian and his curly hair, hips caught in a perpetual wiggle, his great big wonderful laugh still echoing in my ears. Chris, carefully reading Lord of the Rings and quoting NWA songs before speeding through the countryside, while we danced like fiends in his car. Gentle Joe with his beloved garden and fish tanks, flashing his bedroom eyes all over Korea while shouting PAH! so loudly he startled half the country. Sweet Kae and Ichi, with their knitting and shyness about using the F-word. Both of them encompassed everything that was good about the Japanese. Ichi, red faced with beer, slapping her cheeks and saying,

“I am so…..Yopparai!”

And Kae, standing on the platform of the train station, waving with all her might until the last train I took out of Yatsushiro was long gone. That moment, in and of itself, wrenches my heart apart and keeps me awake at night.

It was all of this and more that Katie and I talked about today. Both of us caught up in the heady longing of memory. Both of us understanding exactly the same thing, finally, about our lives in Japan. Katie summed it up so simply:

“How can something so amazing hurt so badly?”

It is at that moment that I am struck by an image of Katie from the last time I saw her before she left the JET Program. We had all had a final dinner together, me leaving with Kae in her car and Katie climbing on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. We passed each other on a small country road and the last thing I saw was Katie, clinging tightly to her boyfriend, her tiny face windblown and streaked with tears so slick they reflected all the lights of passing cars. I now know all too well how she felt. And somehow I know that both of us, in some small and maybe forever shrinking way, will forever be on the back of that motorcycle, flying through the balmy Japanese night, our hearts trickling down our faces for everyone to see.