Roots

The end is always hard, even when it’s right.

I’ve just handed in my notice. I’ll be flying out of Japan for good on the 12th of July; two months today exactly, I’ll be in England. And I’m finding it difficult to imagine already: finding it impossible to know what life will be like when Japan isn’t my home anymore. When my students aren’t my students, and my house isn't my house, and my scooter isn’t my scooter, and my bed isn’t my bed. When the rice fields I drive past aren’t my rice fields, and my spot on the beach isn’t my spot; when the shrine in the cave isn’t my shrine. When this country isn’t the one I come back to, and tie myself to, and dream in and about. I’m finding it hard to imagine my life without Japan in it, or what it will turn into.

And even as I start to pull away - as I start to gently tug my roots away from the land that has been mine for two years - it’s already hurting. This isn’t just the only country I have ever belonged to by choice, not by birth. And it isn't just the only country I have loved with all of me: loved the intricacies and the contradictions and the beauty and the strangeness, not because I come from it, but because I wanted to be here.

It is more than that. Japan is the country where I have learned to love children: to adore everything they are, and everything they have the potential to be. It’s the country in which I have created the strongest memories of my life - some beautiful, some painful - and it’s the country I have given the most of myself to and in. It’s the place where I have finally learned how to be alone, and how to be myself, and how to heal; it’s where I have been scared, and hopeful, and ill, and happy, and free, and in love, and lonely, and full of wonder. It’s the place where I’ve learned how much I am made of, and how little. It’s the country I came to for love, and was broken by love, and came back to so that it could heal me. It’s where I discovered how brave I can be, and how kind, and how strong. And it’s where I discovered that my world was conquerable, but that I was not.

Japan has been everything to me. It has been school, and home, and student, and whipping boy, and brick wall, and lover. And it has changed me completely, because the girl that gets off the plane on the 12th of July will be nothing like the one that got on it in August 2009. She’ll be lesser in some ways, perhaps, and more broken in others, but so much greater in many more. She’ll be someone I know much better, and like more, and understand fully. And I wouldn’t have her without love, or a broken heart, and I certainly wouldn't have her without Japan.

It’s time to do the hardest thing I have ever done and the lesson Japan has taught me: to know when to let go of what I still love and move forward. It’s time to take the strength and courage I have found here and start a new and terrifying adventure. One that will give me what Japan cannot give me, and take me where Japan can no longer take me. But as I start to separate myself from the country that has changed me, and become a part of me, I know that I will fail. Because it doesn’t matter how gently I pull, some of my deepest roots are going to break.

And when I finally leave Japan, I know a part of me will stay here.