In my dreams, I fly

Actually, I don’t. But I do pack.

I spent a semester abroad (the contemporary fancy term, back then I just said I was an exchange student) in college. I studied in Japan fall semester 1991.

I loved it.

Don’t get me wrong. I freaked throughout the entire thousand hour flight with its dozens upon dozens of plane change.

(Yes, I am completely exaggerating. That’s just what it feels like.)

And the college dorm was packed six to a room (not an exaggeration) until the students going to host families could be sorted. So some of us, including me, had to temporarily bunk at a sister facility about an hour’s very slow bus ride away.

And I had a major panic attack the first morning. And minor to major panic attacks at least once a week. I freaked out and fretted over taking trains (not a thing here in central KY) and registering at the appropriate local bureaucracy at the right time. I remember getting super shaky and crying waiting for one of my mom’s planned phone calls. (Before cell phones, well they existed but real people didn’t have them, so we wrote letters and scheduled calls.) I don’t remember how it started. I just remember being nearly straight-jacket level insane with the roundabout of what ifs cycling through my head.

I wanted to see and do as much as possible, but I had just barely enough money for tuition and dorm and textbooks and groceries. Just like college back home in that respect. My mom helped as she could and she paid the airfare. I couldn’t have done anything but homework in my room without her.

I did go out. I had a travel guide and picked sights and events in the area. I rode trains. I got very lost very often. Doko is where in Japanese. I can’t write my name in katakana anymore, but I know “where.”

I hung out with other students — American, Japanese, Swedish. Sometimes we would do outings with two or three or more of us. I met a guy, not a student, a Brit teaching English at a Japanese middle school. He proposed on the phone after I was back in KY.

There was a group of us who went to the local public baths together. Me and all of my body issues, plus Suzanna and Cora and Emily(?).

I really enjoyed most of my classes. I only truly hated one. That prof was such a dick. (Autocorrect is really fighting me on “dick”. You’d agree if you’d known him, autocorrect.)

I don’t know how I did it. I was a constant jello-blob mass of nerves for four months. I look back and I really wonder how. How did I do it? Like I’m looking for the secret wires and mirrors of a magic show.

I got really super extra anxious every three or four weeks. I took the train from our local suburb station into the main city. There was a McDonald’s outside the city station. A vanilla shake and maybe a small fries calmed me down like nothing else in the world.

I never really had the back-in-school-haven’t-studied-for-the-test-naked-at-the-lockers dreams. I do sometimes dream I’m packing to leave Japan, or packing to leave for Japan.

A part of me will always want to live there again — without having to rent an apartment and get a job. That’s the greatest advantage to study abroad programs.

Why am I telling you this? Three reasons, I guess.

1. I finished that book about living your alternate lives as you hang between dead and alive. I have a lot of thoughts and emotions and memories and maybe a small aneurysm all bubbling up from that.

2. I didn’t want to write sad. Or annoyed. Or frustrated. Or peeved. Or what-the-fuck-is-up-with-these-damn-deer. Not even with Wilde-esque wry detachment. I wanted to post a happy memory just for once.

3. “Tell a family story or write it down” completes a summer reading bingo. Most of the family lore I know ends with my dad drunk and possibly in jail. I don’t want to share those stories with my niece. But I will tell her about Japan. I can’t show her this blog because of the cursing, but I have time to edit a PG version for her.

p.s. Delta lost my luggage, a huge footlocker I could barely move, when I came home. Because of course. Twenty-two hours of flying (not an exaggeration unfortunately) and no toothbrush or clean undies when I got home. We’d all just gotten to sleep (I landed at 11 pm EST, then missing luggage paperwork, then home) when BAM BAM. Delta flight crew found the somehow overlooked 75 pound (before strict luggage weight and size restrictions, truly it was a golden age of travel) footlocker. And Delta felt so bad they had someone from the airport deliver to my mom’s house. At 2 am. And I finally got to brush my teeth. Which is as close to “and they lived happily ever after” as you can get in a true story.