Of Time Travel on the Shakkotan Peninsula

This was inspired by Amanda when, upon asking her how the painting of her new house had gone, she reminded me it had been less than a week since last I’d seen her, and the painters were still very much hard at work.

My god; you're right. It’s only been a week.

It's a strange thing, but with all the change in my life over the last week, it kind of feels like I've lived lifetimes in the interim. The idea that exactly a week ago I was finishing up my farewell dinner with my family and heading back to my mom's place to do the very last of my packing seems so incongruous as to be fictional.

That I could have spent 17 hours on a plane (only 13 of them actually in flight); that I could have lost 12 hours somewhere between Saturday and Sunday--somewhere between Toronto and Tokyo in a never-ending day; that I could have spent three nights in Tokyo and met all the people that I did, that I could have flown to Sapporo, met my new supervisor, and come all the way out here to Furubira to get settled in my monster apartment and work two days at the Board of Education...

That all this could have transpired over the span of a week is a feat of science fiction. Time travel or quantum singularities or boogeymen or something along those lines.

If a week could feel so very long, if it could be filled with so much change and growth and difference, what will I be like at the end of next week? What huge and remarkable things will I have accomplished? How will I have grown and changed? Weeks like this make me wonder if I couldn't be completely fluent in Japanese by this time next Saturday--if, perhaps, I will have met and become friends with everyone in this town. I mean, sure, such feats are impossible for one person to accomplish in the span of a week, but, with the way I've watched time balloon and ebb and fluctuate over the last week, I can almost convince myself that those were attainable goals.

Though, funnily enough, thinking about how one week could stretch out to become like a month gives me my first real pangs of homesickness. I wonder how I could possibly live in this place, detached from you and all of those like you who I love and need in Canada, for another 51 weeks?

HA!

Then again, when you put a number like that on it—51 weeks—it all of a sudden becomes fleeting and totally surmountable. When you do that, all of a sudden it's a countdown, and it brings out the very converse feeling: that I'm running out of time and a year will be up before I know it; that there is so very much I wish to accomplish in that year, and how could 51 weeks possibly be enough time to do so!?

Regardless of whether my time here is too short or too long, I’m here, and every so often stuff like this happens to remind me I’m in the right place at the right time:

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