Nostalgia, noun: A Greek compound consisting of
nostros (returning home) and
algos (pain), so basically, "pain from going home". Yep, I have come to fully understand this particular word.
Nostalgia and me, we're down like four flat tires.
If I were a betting girl, I'd own even less than what fits in two giant suitcases (which is what I've got now). I had been anticipating my trip home for, well, for 13 months. I had bouts of home sickness on and off during my first year away, and although there were more than plenty of distractions, the people and places that make me the Gail that I am were never far from my thoughts. I daydreamed about my 2 months at home more and more often as the year came to a close and I thought I had a pretty good idea of how it would all go down. Wrong.
First I got double bounced on the trampoline of reverse culture shock. When I left Tokyo early on an overcast Monday morning, I had not yet lined up a job for my return two months later, but had a place to stay in the city and had made my peace with spending the next year back in the fray with my group of friends and within reasonable distance to my Japanese home town, Katsutadai. I would be less than an hour away for visiting old students, and of course Japanese Mom and Dad, who owned the local dive where I found the majority of drinks, meals, and language study as a newbie in Japan. It was under these conditions that I said goodbye, and though I still cried, it was really a bit dramatic considering the goodbye was followed by, "See you in 2 months."
Mom and Dad were at JFK just where they left me a year ago, and on that first night home, I didn't experience any of the anxiety or panic that my fellow ex-pats warned me about. I fell asleep watching the Daily Show in the company of family and my beloved Jon Stewart, with a belly full of an American restaurant sized portion of mussels in Belgian beer broth, on a pillow that smelled like home, under a ceiling fan that rattled a familiar rhythm, in the house I grew up in, in a town that knew me at 7 and 17, in a country where people spoke my language and were not shocked by my shoe size.
I awoke suddenly at 4:00am from that relentless "may not graduate from college" dream. Chances are you know it in some form. In my head, it's a week before finals start and I'm due to graduate, granted I pass the exams. I'm in my dorm room frantically looking through stack of unorganized papers and notebooks trying to find the class schedule I was issued at the beginning of the term. I've just snapped out of some semester-long party haze and have come to the realization that I haven't gone to class since the first week. I take breaks from verbally abusing myself "What the hell is wrong with me?" "How did I let this slide so long!?" to switch to good cop and reassure myself that I have excellent memorization skills and can cram for a week enough to pass the finals, IF ONLY I could remember where the class meets, when, and which text book I need to borrow.
I sit up in my old room and look around as the last 6 years since I graduated march back into position. Right, done with college, career started, changed, moved to Japan, home on vacation, everything's ok, exhale. Still, I'm wide awake and can't think of anything else to do, so as the birds start gossiping about the first 5 minutes of their day, I tiptoe into the office to check my email. And just like that, before I can even get my bearings in my new hemisphere, I find I'm going back to college, only this time, I'll be the teacher who doesn't know where the class meets or which book we're using.
I wasn't going back to Tokyo, not returning to my circle of friends, not moving in with my Japanese boyfriend, in fact, we were effectively breaking up since the language and culture barriers didn't leave room for adding a distance factor to the obstacle course. I was moving to Osaka, teaching college! I had to find a place to live! I needed a professor-esque wardrobe! This was all too much to take in before my first cup of coffee that I didn't really need, because according to my body clock, it was three in the afternoon. I accidentally-on-purpose let out an audible "oh my God" that I hoped my parents would hear and come in to help the world spin a little slower. My Mom appeared in the doorway less than 10 seconds later. Gotta love that bond.
6 weeks earlier I had not yet packed the first box of my adorable first Japanese apartment and was obsessively hitting the refresh button and glaring accusingly at gmail, looking for some kind of response from the interview at my dream job I had been to just a few days earlier.
How about now?
No.
Now?
No.
Into the kitchen to make a sandwich, waiting for the bread to toast, REFRESH! Now?
Damn.
This went on at decaying intervals for days, then weeks, until finally after 5 weeks of silence from the college and only a week away from my flight home, I'm sitting in my usual spot at my local dive when the guy I've been seeing for a few months, Mineo, asks me,
"So, still thinking maybe to move to Osaka or maybe now staying in Tokyo?"
"I don't think I got that job in Osaka. I'm unemployed."I say as I stick my lower lip out and stir my drink.
"So, maybe not Osaka then?"
"I don't know what to do. Hopefully I'll find something online while I'm home. I can't afford to live in Japan while I look for a job"
"I'm thinking you stay in my home." Neo says carefully. "I have too many rooms and I don't use. I wanna live with you."
"No you don't. I'm bossy. I'll take over." I say with a smirk.
"That is ideal life for me."
"OK, you can't smoke inside anymore, you have to go on the balcony," I say, purely as a test.
"This is not a problem to me."Neo shoots back.
"Can I decorate? It's such a boy apartment."
"How decorate, like girlish style?"
"You know, I was a designer in the states, I'm not going to go all Hello Kitty on your place"
"Our place." He corrects, and then "Why did you say Hello Kitty?"
"I'll think about it" And so I start thinking.
2 hours and 5 drinks later
"Ok, I'm in."I say out of nowhere.
"Amen?"
"No, "I'm in" I say without slurring. I'll do it, I'll move in. If you're sure that's what you want. Are you happy?"
"I am apex of happiness" putting his fingertips together and making an inverted V with his arms.
That conversation and the look on his face while he added a visual aid to punctuate "apex of happiness" was one of the things whipping around the room when my Mom interrupted the cyclone with "Can't sleep kiddo?"
She was stood behind me, tucking my hair behind my ears as I sat at the computer. She mimicked my "oh my God!" when I told her I got the job. She flopped down into the identical leather desk chair next to mine in her oversized button down pajamas. My hobbit sized Mom kicked her feet back and forth a few inches above the floor as she read the screen.
Dear Gail Sensei,
I'm sorry not to email you soon. I completed the schedule from October. Please see the attached file and tell me if I have need to adjust your schedule.
I thought it was a little unceremonious considering all my obsessive refreshing. Not exactly the email equivalent of thick parchment embossed with "Congratulations, you been accepted to Hogwarts school of..."
I minimized the email to show Mom the spreadsheet schedule behind it. "It's your schedule! It's your COLLEGE TEACHING schedule! Print it, I want a copy." I can only assume this college-teaching schedule will go into the vast storage area that contains quite conceivably every doodle, Mother's Day card, turkey hand tracing, and paper plate mask I have churned out since I could hold a writing utensil. This kind of reverence explains the confidence and ego that make me both unstoppable and impossible to live with. It also explains why my Mom has a public storage unit despite having a guest room, a craft room, an office, a garage, a shed and a BARN.
"Print what?" Now my Dad is leaning in the door way, wondering what the high pitched chatter could be about at this time of the morning. He gives me his trademark smothering bear hug upon hearing the news, and then takes his big shoulders with him downstairs to make some coffee, leaving my Mom and I to stare at each other while we soak in this new reality. "Did you tell Mineo yet?" she wants to know.
That's the thing about women. We're programmed to give a damn what the men in our lives think, even before we've had time to form our own opinions. Even amongst my very rational, driven, brilliant and career-minded friends, at the onset of big news, promotions, licensing exams, awards and honors, one of us will always bring the womens' circle right back to weaving baskets and gathering berries by asking "Well, what does Josh think?" And the worst part is, we were all wondering the same thing. I doubt very much men have this problem.
"I don't want to tell him over email, and we don't do well on the phone. It's all we can do to set a meeting place and have both of us understand the train station and the time."
Mom, having never met Mineo is already on his side. "Well, don't tell him yet. You just left, and he thinks you're coming back to Tokyo. This is too much bad news too soon." I agree because I can't think of a better plan, and follow the smell of coffee downstairs where my parents and I reconvene the 'can you believe it' conversation in the living room without a TV only used for occasions like these. "How many sugars, professor?" my Dad proudly mocks from the kitchen.
It a funny thing about receiving really good news at dawn. You just don't know how to celebrate. Still half asleep and not yet believing it, there's no one to call without waking them. If it were 6pm instead of 6am it would be so easy. Get dressed, we're going out for dinner and drinks, call your friends, have them meet us at the bar after dinner. Done. Celebration begun.
Instead, we check the weather to see what kind of a beach day it's going to be. We jokingly discuss sewing corduroy arm patches onto anything in my suitcases with long sleeves. We wander off topic and then at the first pause in conversation, either Mom or Dad will look at me and exclaim, "Dream job!"
Oddly enough it's just after noon and I'm sitting on the beach watching my Dad rig the sailboat with a can of beer in my hand when the anxiety hits. Not about anything specific, just a general omnidirectional uncomfortable buzz that radiates out from my rib cage. It's unsettling given my surroundings. My closest friends, Cat and Jude, have arrived and are talking with my parents. Sun on my face, breeze on my neck, beer in my hand and I'm home. I try to pinpoint the problem. Too many variables. Could be the jet lag, time difference, reverse culture shock, vertigo from an instantaneous new job and city, a cup too many of Dad's infamously strong coffee? What the hell do I have to be upset about? The world just brought me breakfast in bed, and on the first day of a two month vacation, no less.
Looking back, the uneasiness I felt that first day back in the States was more than likely, my least favorite of all the literary devices, foreshadowing.
To be continued...
