Miles from Home

October arrived rather suddenly this year.

One day, the air was still hot and sticky enough to make me question every clothing choice I had made that morning. Then, seemingly overnight, I found myself grabbing a light cardigan before leaving the house and reaching for my Doc Martens again.

The cicadas are gone, too.

They’ve been replaced by 鈴虫 (Suzumushi), which I just learned are called bell crickets in English. A surprisingly cute name for an insect whose primary job seems to be announcing that summer is over.

Seasons are easily identifiable in Japan. That’s partly what I love about living here. Spring warms into the hot, sticky, muggy mess of summer that feels quintessentially Japanese. Cicadas scream from every available tree. Everyone complains that it’s too hot. And then it isn’t. I spent most of that hot, sticky, muggy mess simply living my life as it came.

June marked my first anniversary at my current job, which also meant it had been a little over a year since I moved back to Japan after spending nine years in Buffalo. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. I was busy. Thus my last blog post is marked May.

We had an HR and General Affairs retreat at one of our manufacturing sites, which gave me a chance to meet colleagues from offices and factories around Japan.

Somewhere during those conversations, I realized that my slightly nonsensical career path had given me a strangely useful perspective. I started my career in a factory as an engineering translator. Then I somehow ended up in plant accounting as a financial analyst. Now I’m in Global HR at our headquarters in Japan. Apparently wandering between departments, countries and professions for most of my twenties has made it difficult for me to look at anything from just one angle.

The retreat was also where I spent an unreasonable amount of time talking and laughing with a coworker I had developed a bit of a crush on. We were assigned to the same group.

Of course we were.

One of the women in our group kept commenting on how friendly we were. I later found out that she had apparently been excited to finally talk to me because she was secretly a fan of mine from afar. I didn’t know I had fans. This was news to me.

July brought me back to Yokohama for my ten-year high school reunion.

I had missed a lot. Not necessarily the big things. Social media makes sure you know who got married, who had a baby, who moved somewhere interesting and who has apparently become very passionate about running. But I had missed the ordinary access to people. The ability to say, “We should get dinner sometime,” without knowing perfectly well that I would be on a plane back to America in two weeks.

For most of my twenties, Japan was a far away home. It was somewhere I visited.

At the reunion, I saw people I hadn’t properly talked to since we were teenagers, and somehow, after all that time, conversation still came surprisingly easily. This time when we said, “Let’s do this again,” I realized I could actually mean it.

I live here now. I might have to take a bullet train, but I could be there. It’s been over a year, and somehow that sentence still catches me off guard sometimes.

August was considerably less sentimental.

Remember the coworker I had a bit of a crush on? Turns out he had a girlfriend. Since January.

I found this out on August 21st, not because he told me, but because I overheard something I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. I have very good hearing. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes you find out your office crush has apparently been in a relationship for eight months.

A friend confirmed it.

She had known since February. She apologized for not telling me because she thought he would have the decency to tell me himself, since we were so close. Apparently I was the only one in our friend group that had not been CC’d.

I spent approximately three days unable to sleep, losing my appetite and discovering that food apparently stops tasting good when you’re heartbroken.

Good grief.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, I stopped having a crush on him at 12:15 PM on a Wednesday. Just like that. This was new. At 29, apparently I can just go:

Oh. I don’t like that.

And leave it there.

With my newly vacant romantic bandwidth, I decided to try a new dating app. The first person it showed me was my married coworker.

I closed the app.

Reopened it.

Yup, that’s him.

Deactivated my account faster than I made the profile.

What are men.

August was also the month one of my former bosses was transferred to Thailand.

I call him my work-dad, which is probably not a title he applied for. He had been my indirect boss in Buffalo and later became one of the people who helped me find my way into my current job in Japan. He knew both versions of my working life. Having him around made the transition easier in ways I don’t think I noticed until I found out he was leaving. That one was harder.

People move.

Jobs change.

Apparently people acquire girlfriends and neglect to CC you on status updates.

Then came September.

September was nice. That’s almost the whole review.

Remember the woman from the retreat who had apparently been a fan of mine? We became friends. I started doing that more in general—asking people I liked to dinner instead of vaguely hoping friendship would happen by itself.

Revolutionary, I know.

I changed hair salons. I went home for five days and saw old friends. I got aggressively hit on in Osaka. I pulled my autumn clothes out of storage and decided what still felt like me and what didn’t.

And despite the dating app’s first attempt at psychologically damaging me, I eventually tried again. I matched with someone funny. I still haven’t seen his face. Don’t worry about it, he made me curious. And after August, curious felt pretty good.

And then, somehow, it was October.

I’ll turn 30 in April.

I don’t have a list of thirty things I need to do before then. I don’t particularly feel like I need to squeeze anything else out of my twenties before they end. I didn’t do anything special for my last summer in them, either.

I went to work. I saw old friends. I made a new one. I liked someone and then I didn’t. I said goodbye to someone. I downloaded some dating apps with questionable results. Mostly, I was just living.

I don’t remember the last cicada I heard this year. There must have been one. One final little scream from a tree somewhere while I walked to the station or came home from work, completely unaware that this was apparently a significant moment.

I didn’t notice.

And now the bell crickets are outside my window. My Doc Martens are back by the door.

Summer ended without me noticing.

I suppose my twenties probably will, too.