彼女の写真。My Girlfriend’s Pictures.

The countdown clock on my widget dashboard caught my eye this morning as it reminded me that my flight back to Japan is a mere eight days away.  Recently, the thoughts that have been flowing through my mind have been centered around what I will be leaving behind once my plane pulls up from the tarmac.  Sure, there goes my Junior year at Boston College, friends, Mexican food (not that Chipotle garbage) and the language I’ve been speaking since before I can remember, but those are casualties with which I have already come to terms.   The fact of the matter is that I have unknowingly decided to sacrifice luxuries I have been taking for granted since I was greeted by the world with a spank in that hospital room twenty years ago.  I thought I knew what I was getting myself into only to be proven wrong by pictures of nothing.  For the past couple of weeks, my girlfriend, Moé, has been using my camera to capture snapshot souvenirs of the American way of life and country.  At first, I thought she was wasting the space on my miniscule memory card, but as she has continued to take photo after photo of open fields and thickets of trees the gravity of my situation has ever so slowly begun to dawn upon me.

This is not a picture of a boat

I’m a NorCal boy.  Vacationing in South Lake Tahoe, epic airsoft battles in the hills, going to schools where the classroom doors all open into sunlight, not the fluorescent glow of a hallway:  these have been the bread and butter of my formative years.  To finally come to the realization that the woods in which I have reclined and the stars upon which I’ve gazed will no longer be available to me is a load of bricks pressing down upon my shoulders.  I feel strange that there is no apprehension with regard to giving up English, soon I will be spitting out Japanese like nobody’s business, and although there is a pit of sadness in my stomach to know a full quarter of my time at BC will pass in my absence, I have never had trouble thoroughly enjoying the experience of moving to a new place (I moved from just north of San Francisco to Boston by myself… twice).  No, it is the vastness of my homeland that will be gone, the ability to walk five or ten minutes and have no buildings, roads or cars in sight.  In Japan, an hour walk from my host family’s home would leave me in another portion of the urban jungle, Tokyo.

This is not in Japan

To say I am being blindsided by this concept is incorrect, rather I voluntarily let slip the thought that the city would press in on me.  I visited Tokyo, lived there for over two weeks loving every minute of my stay, but it was the temporary quality of my journey that made it so easy to choose to be ignorant of my trade.  After eight days, I will not be visiting Japan but living there.  My home will no longer be this house surrounded by grassy hills but the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Ito of Shinjuku-ku.  But am I scaring myself unnecessarily is the question.  Is this cold feet?

This is

Moé just asked me what I was writing about, and explaining this blog post was so much more difficult than it should have been.  Searching for the right words to say that I sound sad without being sad and am scared without being scared is damn near impossible.  Her pictures, I explained, are all of nothing.  They are not empty but are of emptiness.  Every landscape or panorama she has taken is of the wide open space I wake up to each morning.  The backdrops of buildings and mountains are pretty, but those are not the subjects of each of her photographs.  Now, with Japan just a week away, the concept of living without all this space is causing just a bit of anxiety.  Am I ready for Japan, she asked… absolutely.  The question I ask myself however, am I ready for this space to disappear… we will see, but regardless of how I feel I am locked in.  I have made my decision and I know I will have the time of my life.  Really, my only fear in traveling to Japan is that I will be caged, but how could that happen in a city where every street is something new and a country overflowing with things and traditions I have never seen before.

I will arrive in Japan by this time next week.

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