Gazing Continually

I am currently in the midst of making a decision to stay in Japan for another year...or leave for home in August...
The paperwork (the decision) needs to be sent at the end of the month.
It is with this deadline on the horizon that I am looking closer and closer at my life here. For the first five months I was repeatedly reminded of what I was missing. Now I am consistently reminded of what I have.
There is a beautiful light in the evening that filters through my (singular) foggy window and casts an orange haze on the apples, bread and syrup above the sink.
I drive to work through a maze of squatty, marooned-tiled houses. I have to dodge old women in the road, doubled-over, shuffling their feet in tiny steps that keep them in one place for a long time.
There is a shy student in one of my first-year classes who expressed an interest in travelling to Italy someday. He never opens his mouth in class, and hates to be called on, but when he discovered that I had been to "Italia", he spent the ten minutes he had to get to gym class talking to me. He was late to gym and punished for it.
When I arrive at work, I feel good to be there, good about the work I'm about to do. No matter how awkward my conversations will be with my co-workers, no matter how uncomfortable or out of place I feel, no matter how on-the-spot it can get-this is the first workplace in which I have been emotionally invested in the work and happy to be doing it.
My neighbors give me food.
Sometimes I feel that I am tugging at the skirt of Japan, hoping that it will pick me up. When it doesn't, which is often, I am left to puff up my chest and carry through on my own. One could say that would be the case no matter where I lived.
When I take a walk at night, I have a choice to go to the cemetary, and listen to the rustling up the hill. Or I can walk around the tributary full of fishing boats and snoring, toothless fishermen curled up in their dark boats like they were in the bosom of an obachan, rocking them to sleep.
I have so many reasons to stay.
I have so many reasons to return to the states.
What is novel and poignant and MY OWN, has its parallel back home.
It has taken me a while to learn that home is not only where David is, or where things are familiar. I can do this myself. (even without cheddar)
I assume this is just what happens as a human being matures. As exhilerating and promising as that can be...it is terrifying to let go of familiarity so frivolously, and make purely selfish decisions.
I would list the things I miss about home. But I need to sleep. How about this:
I miss you.

Lost
by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

(Looking for a more thoughtful commentary about recontracting with the JET program?
I personally have been enjoying Ken's---->.)