The weather’s been getting warmer lately, and the streets are alive with trees beginning to blossom. Things are starting anew, yet all I can think of is summer.

Summer has always been my favorite season. I’m not good with cold, mainly, and I live in Jersey, so the only time we have any fun is when it’s warm enough to go to the shore, after all. I’ve always been happy in the summer, hopeful. I don’t even mind the heat or the humidity - I feel it, but it just doesn’t bother me, I guess. My best memories are running around my neighborhood after Mister Softee. Things are most vivid to me when they’re surrounded by scraped knees and mosquitos.

Everybody says that spring in Japan is by far the best season, and I’ll certainly agree it’s the prettiest, if in a stereotypical Japan sort of way. Japan wants you to look at its best side, the maiko under the cherry blossom, the magazine cover, and you forget about everything else that makes Japan beautiful, even if it didn’t strike you at first glance. But cherry blossoms only last three weeks, in Japan. They’re the beginning, but they’re not everything. In fact, sometimes I don’t think they’re anything.

To me, Japan and summer are linked inextricably. It’s an old feeling, and a new feeling at the same time. My first memories from Japan were in summer, in a hot, confused, sweaty kind of way. And my last memories were of summer, like sitting on a porch, watching the summer sun set into a hazy dusk. The cry of the natsuzemi were the first and last thing I heard, and when I think of Japan, all I see is a brilliant green.

I was alive in Japan, in the very beginning. And then I started to hibernate, to withdraw a little bit, and in the dead of winter the most I could hope to do on a given day was study. Yet in the spring I finally emerged, just that little bit better at Japanese, and felt like I had started my real life, joining ping pong, making new friends, finally feeling like Kyoto was my home now and forever. And summer rolled around yet again, and I was settled into my new life. I belonged there, and it was beautiful. And then I had to leave.

I just want to get back to that feeling, when I was alive. I feel like I’m asleep again, and I’ll only wake up once I feel that humid air over my face, and hear the distant chirp of cicadas.

I’ve been waitlisted for the CIR position in JET. It doesn’t even seem real to me, because this is what I’ve planned on doing for the last few years of my life. I’m scared. I’m not sure what I should do now. But I do know that those memories are still too vivid, too important to me, to give up now.

I’ll hear the natsuzemi once more. I just have to keep believing that, and I’ll get through.