Mourning the future not taken

So I got a call from my mom this week. After waking up enough to figure out what was going on, I ended up with a bit of a shock. Not really bad, just sad.

So when I was young, my mom gave me a Hope Chest. This was a tradition in her family for girls to help prepare them for marriage (or single life recently). Every year on birthday's or Christmas you get one gift for the Hope Chest. This might be dishes, or pots and pans, etc. Essential things that you buy a little at a time so it's ready for you when you move out. I had accumulated quite a bit. Lots of dishes, pans, silverware, glasses. Now, I am also a bit of a pack-rat. I keep almost everything. It's crazy. So before I came to Japan I boxed up everything I was leaving behind and put it in an unused room in my parents house. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

So I got the call from my mom. Turns out my brother and his family are moving back into my parents house and they need that room. As no one is sure when I'm ever going to return to America, the solution was, it's time to get rid of the stuff.

So my mom called me to find out what I had to keep. This is a hard question at 3AM. I finally settled that I needed to keep my books and my art supplies and pictures. I guess everything else I can live without. And it's true, I don't really need any of that stuff. I guess it was just a representation of my past, and of a possible future.

So now I have lost one more thing that tied me to my home in America (as well as a house to move back into) and a future that I grew up assuming I would have. But it's funny how things change. I don't really regret not having that future. But there's still a sense of mourning. I don't know how you really mourn something you never had, but still, it's there.

But on the up side, it feels like I've been freed to continue looking forward to a future in Japan. Recently there is much less uncertainty in my conversations. Before I was always "if I can stay in Japan" and now it's more like "when".

So this week has been a strange mixture of emotions; relief, sorrow, anger, hope. But never fear. I'll forget about the whole thing soon enough. Haha