I could give you a mirror
Atsushi comes back for the three-day weekend tomorrow, sounding much worse than when he took off for Kyushu a few days ago. I would have said that that’s what he gets for going somewhere where he’s without my loving arms to hold him, but he hardly contradicts me on that point, so there’s no point in being a punk about it. The day after our last social obligation, I used the leftovers from the holiday to make chicken soup with a pretty scandalous amount of ginger. And garlic. And pepper. Any self-respecing mucous membrane would have been positively euphoric. When I saw him off, he was much better than he had been, but he was going right back into the incubator. Anyway, the flu is pretty severe here, especially on the Sea of Japan coast; everyone stay healthy.
I can understand how he feels.
When I came back to live in Japan in 2000, it was to Oita, and I had to live their for four long years before being able to come up to Kyoto. I love the mountains and the onsen, but most of the rest of Kyushu is pretty hard to bare for long periods of time.
Yeah, we joke that his apartment in Kyushu is our 別荘. It’s funny for me, because I don’t have to live there; I go for the occasional stray weekend, and we drive into the mountains to an onsen. It’s not so funny for him, because he’s stuck there with nothing to do.