Though it's hard to explain, up until now my feeling of traveling back and fourth in Japan and the US has been bitter-sweet. I love the people and places I know in both countries of course, but none of my friends or family from here would ever want to come to Japan with me, and conversely, I never saw (and seldom converse at length with) anyone I met in Japan while in the US. I guess they all just figure it's a matter of time before I come back to see them again. Still, whenever I want to see one side, I have to abandon the other. For a long time, I felt kind of like when I sit at a gate in an airport waiting to leave. Even though I can see where I am clearly through the floor to ceiling windows it seems like I'm neither here nor there: 7,118 miles away from one and emotionally departed from the other. I'd been this way for so long that I began to believe that this is just the way things have to be for someone like me... but it's amazing how fast that can change.
Over the course of a few days I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with the beauty of my acquaintances and my situation both here and in Japan. For the first time this weekend I introduced my exclusively English speaking family to some of my dearest friends that don't speak English, and in doing so closed a large gap in my life. For an all too brief few days we all sat and shared our conversations, culture and even food with one another. I know my being an unquenchable optimist sometimes leads to my exaggerating certain events, but it's not an understatement to say that I have never been more content.
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