Complete and Creative

In Love…With a Time (2/2)

…continued from

Tsuru, the little countryside town where I studied, is a thoroughly uninteresting place. I don’t care how much history it might have or the fact that it’s greenery offers a refreshing change from Tokyo’s ultra-urban environment. The weather there sucks. All of Tsuru and its neighboring cities are in a valley, so it’s sweltering in the summer and fall and freezing in the winter. Spring is the only time with pleasant weather.

The place I called home during one of the most wonderful times of my life.

But Tsuru is my favorite place in all of Japan.

Okay, that might be a bit of stretch, but it is where I have the most friends and memories.

As I stated a while back, people are the reason people travel. But I don’t think traveling, or life in general, is so single-faceted that we can say we like this place for the place itself and we like that place for the people in it. It’s a combination. And there’s another factor to be considered.

Time.

It’s my time in Tsuru with the friends I made there that I miss.

Although I have yet to visit since my departure on 27 December 2005, I have seen many of the friends I met there on several occasions, both American and Japansese. Some of the Americans have gone back to visit. Some of the Japanese have come over to California to be international students.

But it’s just not the same. The Americans are no longer living in the same apartment complex, everyone literally just a few doorsteps away from each other. Our Japanese friends can no longer come over and talk until the wee hours of the morning. We can no longer make midnight runs to the store to buy food or alcohol.

We can no longer go to sleep knowing everyone is living in the same town, knowing that we’ll all see each other within a few days at most.

We’ve had many reunions since then, none of which was complete. A few of us met here and there. Chatting. Eating. Basically doing the same stuff we did back in Japan except in different places.

Even if by some miracle (you know, with work and everything else that life throws at us) all of us go back to Tsuru and stay there for a few weeks, with the same people at the same place, it won’t be the same.

For the time has already passed.

And we will never get it back.