The Wrong Fit: Expectations, Realities, and Everything I got Wrong.

I came to Tokyo with a suitcase. Now I leave with two. Reluctantly, I will say - I’m loathe to spend at even the best of times. And buying an extra suitcase after so many years of moving solitarily? Well - there's a stabby, hangnail part of my brain forming pure inadequacy.

But what's a girl to do? I'm uprooting two emotional, intense, fabulous, crumbling, nothing and everything years of my life into hollow plastic cuboids. There's too much to fill what I came with. I've crammed so much in these past 24 months, sometimes it's like I risk splitting at the seams.

Not all things here have been fulfilling, though. Including the whole reason I came here in the first place.

This week I showed up to work filled with not very much at all. Walking through grey-white hallways of bone-soft lino, I saw no-one, met no-one. Opening my locker, third from the bottom and taking out my school shoes - a metaphorical role-change through actual change in footwear.

It's been one of the worst fits of my life. 

I'm not going to get into the reasons why JET and my placement school hasn't been perfect - or even great - nor why I can't recommend it for anyone like me. But I will say that this programme, like many other systems, is misleading in its marketing and communications, unsustainable in terms of providing quality delivery to all its stakeholders, and in dramatic need of a systems review.

I left school for the last time with my shoes in my hands and a feeling of empty sorrow. No middle-finger yells or liberated grins. No tears of sadness at having left my students or colleagues. Walking home, patent shoes. Torn at the toes, soft at the heels. Bought for a purpose that barely seems worth the money

Maybe it's because it was a private school. I've been pissed off at that for a while.

Or maybe it just hasn't hit yet.

Luckily, after that horrible last day, I got to hang out with the wonderful friends I've made since coming here. I took a tram to what has become my unexpected second home at my boyfriend’s apartment. I drank with old friends and saw fireworks with new ones. Read poetry. Celebrated a birthday. All of these things were not the life I imagined for myself in Japan, but it's what I got. 

And that's got to outweigh expectations - right? I don't know if you've ever felt this way, gone somewhere with an experience - a life - in mind that turns out to be something different entirely. 

Walking home, Unfulfilled. But maybe like in your situation, despite my discontent a thought occurs:

I have more shoes. Comfy trainers, green rain boots. Silver shoes I bought for Futaba’s wedding - click three times walking down the streets of Ginza:

There's no place like home.

The secondhand white sneakers my Mum lent me before going away. Now worn down past wearing - there's still no strength in me to toss them. 

Off-brand Doc Martens I wore on the plane here, and shall be wearing again on my way home. Those things weigh me down too much in a suitcase. Instead, grounding me through a layer of fluffy socks (no blisters!), I wear them and become my British self again.

I'm sad to leave all the people I love so very much. But I am exceedingly glad to go.

After the last election here, I think Japan First might be glad to see me go too. Maybe if enough foreigners leave, the rice harvest problems will miraculously disappear. And all the jobs will come back.

Glad to be of assistance, Mr Sakurai.

But first, allow me to be a tourist for a while. Wear flip-flops, eat shaved ice. Maybe see a turtle in Okinawa. I'll update you reader, on the off-chance you're interested.

Right now I've got to get packing. I’ve never been accused of hoarding before …

But if the shoe fits.

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In better news, I got shortlisted for Tadpole Press' international flash fiction contest. I'll be published in their Autumn anthology later this year. I’ll end with it. 

Until August, all my sea-stars,

Char xxx 

At Sea

She thinks about death too much, that one. On the precipice of womanhood, she attends me not, breathes something other than this world. Her mother an angel, every day she stands at an ocean’s edge. Salt melting the opacity of her trouser bottoms, shoes abandoned on the shell. Hermit-crab toes digging into silk and silt, she holds out her hands. Wills waves to shore. 

In that lunar-pulled place she is difficult to reach. As a father, all I can do is hold her towel. Sand dollars for ice cream after. Safe. Waiting. Warm. 

These grains between us cannot number my love.