The Era of Leaving, Which Too, Shall Pass.

I knew it would come.
I thought the knowledge of it coming would make it easier. I thought my having voluntarily left everything familiar to me and becoming familiar with meeting people in transit, knowing our relationships had expiration dates, would make it easier.
I thought my comfort with independence and trying new things would make it easier.

And maybe all those things have delayed it, but it's no longer easy.

When I moved to Japan I prepared myself for what I thought was the almost certain possibility that a few months in, I would feel a heavy loneliness and isolation from being in a place where I don't understand the language, and would have only nascent friendships with people who hadn't yet had a chance to get to know me at a level deeper than the surface.

This didn't come to pass. Maybe I'm more adaptable than I thought, maybe I'm better at distracting myself than I expected. Or maybe the visits I had from friends and family and video calls prevented it.

Still, the beginning of this year *was* marked by dissatisfaction with the strength of the connections I was developing. But as the year went on, I grew closer to my friends I made, and I began to feel that I had found my place and was settled in to a good community. I began to feel quite comfortable with the city, and connected socially. My social circles began merging as I introduced friends to friends. And the transient connections with those living temporarily in Tokyo that I thought would quickly fade, lasted.

Then those with whom I had developed strong friendships with, who I trusted, to whom I could tell everything and with whom I would lose track of time, began to reach the expiration dates of their stays in the country. Three dear friends in what felt like one fell swoop, but which was stretched over a few months, left Tokyo. And I saw what would continue to happen regularly as long as I lived as an expat.

But my time here is finite too, and all good things must come to an end.

I didn't want to bring this post to a close on a low note, nor without a real conclusion, so I left it as a draft for 9 months or so (*And published it today in September 2014). However, it is a record of a time in my life where I felt the need to express some melancholy and I don't want to complicate it by trying to derive some optimistic lesson. As always, life has its peaks and valleys, and this period was but a small bittersweet local minimum,