The Thing People Don’t Get

Almost every time I told someone I don’t want to go back to America the response was “You can just come back to Japan again when you’re older!” (Recently it’s changed to “Yeah, Swine Flu is scary! Are you sure you’ll be okay? What if you catch it and die?”)

That’s the thing. I know I can come back when I’m older. I’m fine with that.

The reason I don’t want to go back is because of my friends here. Back in America sure, I had a few good friends. Not many I could talk to regularly. Here in Japan I have several times the amount of friends I had before, people I talk to all the time, who I eat lunch with, who will go out with me with little notice to karaoke simply because we have nothing to do… People I’m close enough with that I’ll let them hug me and hang off of me and such (which, despite what the internet says, Japanese people do do), which I wouldn’t even let my closest friends in America do.

I’m scared of going back to the US and losing contact with them. With any of them. A lot of them say they’ll mail me even once I get back, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before they start replying less and less until they end up not replying anymore. Even if I don’t lose contact, by the time I can go back to Japan they’ll all be spread around to colleges all across the country, and even if I can visit maybe one or two we’ll never be able to get together and spend time with everyone ever again.

It just makes it a whole lot harder at the start of the school year here where almost every week there’s some sort of thing that involves planning for an event later in the year. They come over to me and ask me what I want to do for it, or where I want to go, or what suggestions I have, only to pause afterwards and look at me sadly and say “Oh, you’re not going to be here then.”

There’s planning for the field trip the week after I leave, the Bazaar in October, their experiment group presentations in November (on my birthday), the trip to Okinawa next February… Even when they pass out prints or surveys about it I have to take it back up to the teacher blank because I’m not going to be there when it happens, and it hurts.

Yesterday I went and spent the night at my old host family’s house and then went to a festival up further north in Gunma today. It was really fun, and I got to spend time with them again. My old host dad offered to take me to Akihabara on the 10th (since he works there and knows the area) and I said I’d have to check about it, but I know I won’t have enough money to with dealing with baggage and everything else. And then when I had to leave it was like having to say goodbye to them when I switched host families all over again, except this time I don’t know if I’ll ever see any of them again. I was able to keep smiling and waving as the train went away but as soon as I couldn’t see the station anymore I started crying on the train and was being stared at…

I don’t want to have to say “bai-bai” or “sayonara”, goodbye to any of these people. I want to be able to say “mata ashita” or “mata ne” or “ja ne” (see you tomorrow, see you again, etc.) like I do every day, but there are so few days left I can actually say that and have it be true.

I still have to write my goodbye speech for the last day I’m at school. But I’m procrastinating because I know I won’t be able to get through it without starting to cry, but that’ll probably just get worse as time goes. I still have no clue what to write, either. I know I’m going to thank everyone, but I have five minutes to make the speech, and that’ll barely take up thirty seconds.

If I had known it would be this hard to leave, maybe I wouldn’t have come in the first place.

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