The last night

I’m lying on my futon, on our last night in Japan, head swimming with three years of planning and dreaming, nine months, thirty eight weeks, two hundred and eighty something days of travelling.  It’s over and all that’s left is for us to get to the airport and fly home.

I’m tired.  Three weeks on futons, moving every few days and carrying all our stuff from station to ryokan to station again, has taken it’s toll.  So tired that it’s hard to fish into my soupy brain and find any thing else.  Excitement is in there somewhere.  In less than twenty four hours I’ll be seeing people I’ve spent months missing, I’ve discovered that it’s not easy to be away from the people you love and soon I won’t have to be.  There’s relief.  The previous nine months haven’t always been easy, but we’ve stuck with it.  I am proud, of us all.  I’m sad too.  It’s been an amazing experience, one that not many people are lucky enough to have.  I’m sad that it’s over and our time is up.

There’s other stuff.  Stuff that’s not so comfortable to examine.  How hard it’s been, what the point of it was, how it might not be easy to settle back home, whether it was a good idea in the first place.  I’m not sure how I feel about any of that, and I think it’ll take a while before I do.  For now, I know that people have been kind, we’ve been lucky on the disaster front and we’ve done some incredible things.  It wasn’t half bad.