*

October: no leaves fall. Things are hazy and bright, characterized by a single glare from the sun. For the first time in my life I want winter to envelop me in its chill; I am so hot, I detest perspiration, it is October and Japan is dripping with melting polar ice caps.

"Fan me," I demand tall boys. They shade me from the sun, flap paper fans in my face. My smiles are wide, wide, wide.

*

Early November: I discover I am leaving. The jet plane song runs in my head, an unfunny broken record. Still, I pretend nothing's wrong. The Saturday I find out I cry; I play tennis, I gradually forget that this country is slipping out of my gaijin grasp. At times, during air pockets of memory, I remember. My lips curl, my eyes narrow, my fingernails chew themselves off.

But it's okay. This is what I keep telling myself in between jet song verses: it's okay.

*

*

November weeks wane slowly away and I dance in the still-heat of global warming. I know that soon I'll leave this country, but I won't, yet. I won't yet. (It's okay, it's okay.) My flowy skirts are endless and my eyes are turned, infinitely, to the sun. I live in my flip-flops and I burn, smoothly and darkly, to an Asian crisp. Even the knowledge that with the ending of each day I lose twenty-four hours of Eastern love doesn't hurt me.

November 31st: still, I am invincible, still.

*

Through a fence I see a tall boy playing basketball. I forget about the tennis balls swooshing all around me and am in tune only to the way he looks up, at me, and the way something in my stomach drops and churns and fizzes.

*

I am sixteen. I fall in love. I look in the mirror and I think to myself, crap.

But it's okay, it's okay.

*

December comes. Japan finally opens its doors to the black ships of winter, and I, pouting, put away my Rainbow flip-flops in exchange for ballet flats that have little more protection from the cold than my summer shoes did. The chill stops for nobody but I brave the winter rains, the blues that fall from the sky into this little heart of mine.

I think of the future I won't have in Japan. I think of it often, looking at rice field landscapes and climbing up steep mountain stairs. I think of him often.

*

December sixteenth: I turn seventeen with a haircut he thinks is cute. Clumsily, I fall even more in love. Every day I think, oh oh oh, oh no.

It's okay, I think to myself, rapid fire and cutthroat. It's okay.

*

*

I make short lists in my head of things I will miss. If I write them down I will never come back so I just make them and let them drizzle away, speck by speck. They go something like this: mountains, the rising sun, the setting pinks and reds behind the maples. Back-alley tempura restaurants that seat ten people at the most, vending machine utopias, sandwiches stuffed with obscure vegetables and potato salad. Easy access to Japanese idol propaganda, the Gap-Uniqlo parallel, nameless brands made in China, and on the more traditional side, kimono and yukata. Japanese-Chinese food, Japanese-American cuisine, revolving belts of sushi. Traveling over oceans. Getting lost in time zones. Even on-base, off-base, Hario, the 5 bus, the walk to Family Mart.

Eventually things get more personal. In my makeshift bed of pain I think: this culture I have merged into. When I was fourteen, when I was fifteen, when I was sixteen (soon, when I will be seventeen). Stairs and narrow alleyways on my sixteenth birthday. Good-byes and hellos. Love. Bonds of fate. That time I--. That Boy.

*

Delusions of grandeur fill my mind: moving dates that are pushed back, titles that begin with g and end in irlfriend, tall boys with fans, Japan forever. I hear the sounds of cracking armor every day, but the rusting blends in with the sunshine and I am okay, I am actually, actually okay.

Actually, actually, I am not, but I seduce myself enough to believe that I really am. And that is fine for now.

*

Ann, one of my best friends, lies supine in Florida. She misses us deathly. She has homesick written all over her MySpace (since I can't see her face). She wants to see us. We want to meet her halfway, but this is impossible. We are penniless, and leaving anyway.

I tell her about The Boy. She mixes him up with someone similar a few times, then tells me I have done well.

"I miss you, boo," she types. I stare at my messenger window, suddenly very tired.

*

*

"This is so sad," I say to the Japanese sky, stripping itself down into night with streaks of purplish grey. I say the same thing in Japanese. It feels good on my tongue, foreign but smooth, lovely, natural.

I breathe in. American air doesn't smell like this. I am too tired to recognize my bias, but I'm too much in love to care. This is where I belong.

I don't want to leave; it's not okay.

*

My apartment house is filled to the brim with geometrical, brown-packaged shapes. My room is taken apart, seam by seam, and I hastily pack all my valuables in the corner with a sign that reads, in childish Japanese handwriting, 'Please do not touch.' The movers listen but molest everything else. Gradually the house empties out, and I go from walking around a maze to cutting entirely across rooms.

I find things I haven't seen in ages. I gather memories to myself like the unsuspecting tide pool in the corner of the beach. Amongst all the smoothly sailing cardboard boxes, I am a mess of three years of memories that I suddenly find myself having to sort out.

*

Staying at home only means I fester in my sorrow, so I do things. I attend basketball games after the wrestling tournaments, and visit orphanages before going out for sushi. Everywhere I go I take pictures. I try to cram buildings into photosets; people into meaningful bunches of pixels.

I do more things. I have, with a certain sister from another mister, a chaotic yelling bout in her car about boys that are stupid. Afterwards we feel better, accomplished, calm. I wave to people I thought I wouldn't have to leave so soon. I blow kisses to the Pacific Ocean.

*

The Boy writes me a letter in his stocky, boyish handwriting, and it makes me cry in a girl's bathroom. He gives it to me after gym, when the hallway is empty and the only other girl desperately in love with him plays basketball by herself, waiting for him to come join her. But he catches up with me instead, and hands me a card.

"Read it at home," he pleads. I feel like he's pressing me to him but he's only looking at me.

My breath catches. "Okay," I maybe say, I maybe squeak.

"I'm serious," he begs. I notice the ends of his hair, wisps of creamy brown, curl into the nape of his neck. I don't look at his face. I can't. "Please, Melissa. Read it at home."

He looks at me. My heart, doing its cliché thing, skips pandemoniously. Then he turns, leaves me. And I just stand there, still looking, just thinking, hey, don't...go.

*

It occurs to me that it will be very hard, letting everything (mostly him) go. But I oversimplify. I tell myself, no big deal. You can do it, no mess involved, with little crying, with only slightly pink eyes, with your heart just a little bruised...

I can seduce myself into anything. Even the looks on his face can't stop me from believing he's only just a passing phase. I am stupid. I am so stupid.

*

That Boy takes me to lunch. Five months later, I can still remember every detail of it.

*

In spite of everything, I still remember that I have a circle of friends. We slap each other around and speak in a language akin to prostitutes and motorcycle gangs, but the love is there, swollen and almost unbearable. I could cry, but I'd just be made fun of, so I laugh instead. Three out of the less-than-fifteen of us will soon be leaving, but we act like nothing, really, is going to happen, and maybe we're just going on vacation for a really long time.

In the hallway, two sophomore boys whom we will remember by the images of animals, curl themselves into us with hugs that clearly state how much they will miss us. We've only known them since September, but they cry in their tearless teenage-boy way and babble "We'll miss you so much" over and over again.

This time, I really do cry, dry tears and real sobs. I tell them they are horrible people, and they hug me tighter.

*

I take condensed exams and mourn. Thia, the leader of our best friend pack, also moving, weeps beside me in the only way she can--no actual tears are produced, just mumblings of teenage sorrow. We sit on green benches and walk through shopping arcades, we rummage through the past three years of our seventeen-year-old lives (fifteen days apart) and sniffle to the rhythm of sad love songs. Hey there, Delilah, what's it like in New York City?

"I never thought they couldn't be together," I say as we watch music video marathons with celebrity commentary. "I just thought they were apart for awhile."

"Yeah," Thia agrees. Outside, it snows, wet and sloppy, not sticking. "Depressing."

*

*

December 21st: the last day of school before winter break. Thia and I take pictures, hug teachers, and mourn silently through our huge smiles. Mr. S, whom I will remember by the sign on his wall that says love is only free for babies, hugs both of us. I am surprised, and it makes me sadder to think that in this tiny community of two hundred high schoolers, we made something of an impact.

"Two of the good eggs are leaving," my anatomy teacher (and biology, freshman year) says, shaking her head, "and leaving all the idiots behind."

"Harsh," Thia and I say. "But true," we agree. We figure that since we are leaving, ego means nothing to us anymore.

*

I move blindfolded. I don't want to watch my things being taken away, I don't want to watch my essentials put into suitcases, I don't want to see myself move away from the home I've had for two years, four months and twenty-one days--I don't want it, no, no, no. Mostly I do not want to see duct tape wrapped around my cells, my fiber of being. The two-year-old inside of me kicks and screams and froths at the mouth but in my seventeen-year-old posterity I can only stiffen my heart and square my shoulders.

Again I find myself in the ominous gloom of the Navy Lodge: the port of departure. I unlock my temporary lodging, look into the mirror and think, in a horror-film sort of way: AmIokayamIokayamIokay?

Nonononononnononono. Notyet.

*

The difference between six-foot and four-foot-eleven (and three-quarters) is approximately one foot and a quarter. When you're the shorter one, the view from the bottom is always sadder than than at the top.

"You're really short," he says.

I sigh. "Good-bye," I say to his stomach. (That is as far as I go.)

He pulls me in. If I cry on his sweater, he will kill me. So I do.

*

January 1st - 2nd, 2008:

Falling in love platonically does not require the heady footsteps and shaky confessions of a relationship fueled by carnality; instead, there's always someone there to catch you as you fall and squeeze all the best things out of you in the gentlest way. There is an assurance of comfort that only the best of friends can give you, and there are the things that only friends can say to make you cry the way you do when nothing is right, and yet everything is in place.

At two in the morning amidst purple-haired Japanese obaa-sans and quirky, nocturnal Harajuku-esque teenagers I talk to someone on the phone who tells me he's always taken me for granted, that I was always there, but that he always loved me in the way that I always knew he did. He says, "I've always had a gay crush on you." An hour later some people pick me up and twirl me around, another throws a scarf at me. It's all very commonplace and yet I can't help it--I break down. I can't believe any of this is happening.

Looking up into the eye of the storm, all I see are faces. I reach out; something reaches back (thank God).

*

I am a tiny person. Lost in love and life, I'm even smaller. But I can handle it. I did, after all.

In the van, as I leave, I turn around once to wave and wave until my eyes burn out into waxy specks and the people behind me are imprinted directly onto my irises. I blink, and they're still there. For a second I see them stitched between my fingers with red thread, held together even closer with love charms bought from shinto shrines and one yen coins that no one ever used and just let build up. I know they'll stay there forever, eventually melting into my joints and hitching rides on my white blood cells. I know it.

So I turn around again. I yell, "I'M OKAY!"

And I flash them a peace sign.

*

*