A lot has happened since I stopped updating this blog. I’ve landed a job teaching ESL at a university, basically a dream job. I’ve traveled for another project I’m shocked and thrilled to be a part of. I’ve fallen out and back in love. I’ve torn up roots and put new ones down. What’s known and comfortable has come rushing back in a storm of whirring airplane engines and apartment searches, quiet nights spent alone in my first roommate-less place in LA, the dripping Spring Tides of loss upon entering a familiar space. The things that were here before are still here, and a part of me that was in constant motion has finally come to something resembling a state of rest. It gives a false new sense of confidence with which I find myself more and more at ease.

Regardless, I’ve neglected to document these things for several reasons: I got lazy, I got busy, I got both (living in Japan was all the excuse I needed). Once I came back, the guilt of leaving early with so little notice repelled me from that little notebook that held my Honshu life with such quaint efficiency, and I just couldn’t bring myself to recount it with detail. But I owe it to myself. My time there was nearly always beautiful, and beauty of that magnitude and consistency is worth my while.

Putting everything down in the order in which it happened seemed very important to me, and this time-sense has also contributed to holding me back from documenting my life in real time. I’ve been obsessed with chronology, everything in the right order, or else who knows what? Something awful, definitely. But there’s something to be said for time and its effortless gait, over which I pretend to have any grasp by putting things in the right order, or else, as I’ve said, who knows what would happen? Something awful, probably.

I’ll start again, now. Sorry, past self. I know you did your best. I’ll stop talking shit about you now. Probably.