Six

Well, this is me six months into this mad thing.

On August 2nd, 2009, I and my fellow Toronto JETs landed at Narita airport in Tokyo a good 2-3 hours later than we were expected. Night had fallen, but the humid heat of Tokyo still had the Japanese cicadas singing. As we wound through the airport, Sonomi reminded me we were now in Japan (a good thing, that), and she asked me if I was excited.

I told her I didn't know, that it all didn't seem real.

Here now, sitting in the teacher's office at the end of a day at the junior high, with the snow still coming down outside (as it has done for something close to two months straight), I realize I've been here for six months now: half of the one-year contract I signed on for.

I try to get a handle on that: six months past. Six months living in a foreign country for the first time with only the internet and one brief visit to provide me with pieces of home. I try to take a bearing from those six months, but it's just like day one:

I still don't know, and it still doesn't seem real.

Well, I should say it doesn't seem real. Now it all seems a little too real. It doesn't seem strange or different or life-changing and unique in that epic way that you may think such things should. Those strange and different and unique things are still happening; lives are being changed, but it is all happening in increments. Gradually and behind the scenes; not in epiphanies and revelations.

What I do know is that it's different enough to force timelines to be revised, to cause the Master Plan to be altered. I've become wrapped up in the experience, and something that I swore would only be a year long has grown to two.

Here: at a time of year when Hokkaido is at its least hospitable; in an apartment that is so unreliably heated and insulated as to force me to sleep on the living room floor; during a winter so deep and snowy as to make one forget what summer was ever like; with a class that tells me to "go home" on good days and to "die" on bad days...

Here, at the heart of all this, is where I am asked to make my big decision about the next year of my life. At this cold, bleak point, the fact that I can still happily make the decision to stay on for another year says more about how the last six months have been than any detailed timeline or list that I could hope to give.