“I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.”

"Dear Jody.
How are you doing? I've been ill with some godawful flu/plague/black
death thing for nearly two months and it's sucked. Doctor's still
don't know what's wrong with me.

Still on the job hunt and have a few more prospects than a couple
weeks back with is something positive.....
Nothing has gone really right for me since I got back from Japan.
Getting sick more frequently, old "before Japan" friends seem utterly
dull doing the career/marriage/mortgage dance and never have time to
catch up which is bullshit and I've realized other friends haven't
changed at all, still wasting their days popping pills and leeching
off of gullible older men and to top this all off I can't get a proper
job. I try to be bad when I can.

How's your carpentry going? In Australia you'd be known as a
"Chippie". I check your blog often, good stuff.
I miss our phone calls and booze marathons. No one else ever quite got it.
Miss you.
xoxo
Stephanie K."


"Hey!
I have yet to get sick since coming back. Perhaps it is because I have
not stopped drinking?
Please get better. Now I am worried about you.

Some kind of purgatory, abyss?
Yeah, I feel like the things I loved have passed me by; the things I
hated are still there, waiting for me.
Not good.
Myhap we have been too hasty in our dismissals of reverse culture-shock?
I think so. Suddenly, the dull sameness of my day-to-day in Japan
seems better than the frantic unknown that I am experiencing here.
So, I, too, think that if I could go back to Japan, it would be
different this time, better somehow.

But, dear Steph, it's a lie. We hated that place and everything it did
to us and people we love.

I remember meeting Chris (BearsCubs) on his 3rd day in Japan, at the
Sapporo meeting for Hokkaido JETs.
He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, easy going and relaxed. Now, he
is vitrolic and filled with hate towards Japan. He leaves in 2 months.
I expect to be in touch with him in a year, too, as he realizes that
the home he knew is gone, and his fond memories were built-up and not
real.

Sigh. It is painful to be torn in two like this, isn't it?

Although I hated many things about Japan, it had begun to grow on me
in the sense that it was easy to just go through the motions and
collect my pay.
Here, in Canada, when I try to tell people of that, my victory over
that country, my ability to adapt, my proving of social-Darwinism, my
will to survive..., well, nobody cares. They don't give a shit about
the nights where I drank myself to sleep and cried and missed them
like I had never missed anything before in my life.

Steph, no one but us cares, nor much less understands, the ways in
which our hearts are broken.
But, I understand that. And I love you for that.
Even though we have never met in person, when I think of the roughest,
most fun times I had, alone, I think of you and how quickly we loved
each other; loved in the way a soul loves a soul that is in-kind. We
'got' each other. Shit, even in day-to-day living, that is rare. We,
namely I, have been very lucky to connect.

In fact, I am not sure I could have made those final steps without
knowing that I could call you and you would be there for me.
I'll always love you for that. You did something even my best mates in
Canada couldn't do for me while I was in Japan: understand me and not
judge me.

Thank you.

I miss those days of talking and drinking on the phone until one of us slept or our phone battery died, too; very much. I wish for them, and fucking balls to
anyone who didn't get them. It was not for them to get. That was our
release and we loved it and we benefited from it, so fuck them.

I love you, Stephanie K.
I look forward to the days when we meet and drink and talk into the
night and then drink some more in the morning.

You are the best.
And I wish you the best there, in Oz.

-Love Jody
xoxoxoxoxo"