Thursday, August 5, 2010

Homesick?

I'm at home right now but I feel more homesick than I ever have. I'm homesick because I miss how things were, and of course I know I have to get on a plane in a week and fly back to my other life. I'm a completely transient, temporary fixture here and my friends are grown and no longer need me since I'm never around. It's a fool's hope to think life would screech to a halt and wait for me while I run around frantically "figuring myself out" or whatever it is I've been doing in Japan, and not surprisingly I'm finding that the gap between me and the people I consider bosom friends is widening with age. In the past two years I've been away, countless friends have gotten engaged, married, moved in together, started families, divorced, whatever. The economy has been in a rather hellish state of woe and the faces of the government have changed and my countrymen seem to have gotten fatter, sloppier and stupider than ever before. So it's not without considerable and significant changes in the environs that I'm finding myself just a bit stupefied and feeling like a fish out of water being back, but it is still weirding me out to feel like a stranger or alien in my own hometown.

Incoherent and a bit rabid, those are my thoughts. It's of course my own decision to have extended my stay in Japan for three years' total and to have been a shoddy correspondent via email and Facebook and whatever. Maybe that's just how I plan on going about creating a fresh start or a new life. Hurts like a breakup to see everyone changing and getting married off but it's that time in our lives and of course I'm a bad friend if I resent people for making a choice I will not personally make myself.

2 comments:

  1. You feel like that now, just imagine what it is like after 10 years or more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I felt the exact same when I went home last summer. I've disliked my hometown since I was about 18 though so that wasn't a big surprise. Also, I was far too fucking polite to people... it was embarrasing.

    ReplyDelete

What's up?