The Privilege of Sorrow

The way certain physical places have deeply rooted stakes on our hearts will never fail to leave me wonderstruck. I can talk your ear off about how strolling around Gordon's campus this past week has lifted my spirits and refreshed my heart. Even this morning, I traipsed through the woods, smiling and humming and thrilled to be alive. Telling my friends how "happy" and "emotional" it's been to return. Forgetting, once again, what it truly feels like to have a place who's memory rocks you to your core.

Forgetting, that is, until I saw a video of Kubasaki High School on Facebook tonight. 

May I never, ever claim Colonial Forge as my true high school. Having been reminded, I will shout it from the rooftops once more: Kubasaki is my school. Okinawa is my home. It changed me and affected me in a way that no other place will likely ever do. Just the other day, I remembered something I'd written a few weeks before I left, and sorrow stopped me in my tracks because my heartbreaking prophecy had finally come true: 

In time, this place, that I can feel under my feet and touch and smell and listen to, will become nothing more than a hazy picture, a dim memory, just like all the other ones, with no life or feeling behind it. There's no escaping that. It just happens over time. It was the hardest blow. I curled up in a ball right there on the sidewalk and cried. 

And it's true. Gone are the days when I can feel the heat of the Plaza pavement under my bare feet. Gone are the sounds of morning cicadas and the Japanese national anthem floating over the jungle. Gone is the memory of the stair railings to the second floor of the 200's building at school. The smell of the auditorium. All of it. It's disappeared. 

Until I saw this. I turned off the sound and stared at the screen, and all of it (and more) came flooding back in full force, and I sat in my lousy dorm in lousy America and wept silently and uncontrollably at the shock of the sorrow. 

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(I know that this will mean nothing to so many of you, and yet to some, as it does me, it will mean everything. So I'm putting it here.) 

All I can say is that I hope all of you one day experiences a place that has the same profoundly severe impact that this place had, and has, for me. No matter how much it tears you apart. I think that until one has the experience of being changed by a place, there is a part of the soul that will never have the privilege of being cracked open.