I met my wife when I was, I think, fourteen, maybe thirteen, I remember seeing her at a church retreat and thinking she was very beautiful and probably quite mean

I had almost no ambition in my life whatsoever, I thought dimly I might be an artist but I didn’t feel like I was banking very heavily on it, and figured I’d just go to school and be a high school teacher or something because I wanted to have summer vacations. My wife was achingly desperate to travel to interesting places, a desire I did not share in the least.

In the summer of 2012 when I was looking for jobs after finishing undergrad my wife applied to a job teaching English in Japan, almost as a gag. Neither one of us thought very seriously about it but she was invited for a Skype interview and when they found out that she was married they wanted me to apply and interview too.

I remember in the whole application process several strange coincidences seemed to come together, a sort of planetary alignment that everyone involved but me thought must have been divine intervention. It was a Christian school, which is very unusual in Japan. One of the application requirements was that you be able to sing, which was something I was routinely told I could not do. There was a portion of the Skype interview where you had to sing a line or two just to make sure that you could carry a tune. I figured that would be the end of it, did a couple lines of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the interviewer approved to my surprise.

They had us come out to Chicago (well, O’Hare) to do an in-person interview with about half a dozen people who’d flown in from Japan. That October they called us to offer us a job, a yearlong contract starting in March 2013, though they made it clear we would be encouraged to stay longer if we wanted. The HR guy in particular would talk about how God had brought me there and wanted me to be there, there had been times in the past they’d had people they wanted to bring over but something would go wrong in the application process but my wife and I made it. 

We left for Japan in January for a month of training. After that month, they brought my wife and me into a room to tell me I wasn’t working out but my wife could stay on. I asked what it was, they said they couldn’t point to anything specific, it was just me. I asked the HR guy about God wanting me to be there and he concluded they had been wrong.

In retrospect there were some strange coincidences that made our departure quite clean--they brought over about a dozen people and they set everyone up with an apartment but because of the way the year’s schedule was working out the apartment they’d set aside for my wife and me wasn’t ready yet and so we never signed the lease. We had several opportunities to sign up for mobile phone plans but decided to put it off. I remember sitting in a room with several of our coworkers trying to plan a trip to Disney in Tokyo one evening, my computer in front of me with everyone’s tickets in the cart and everything for that summer, and we couldn’t all agree on a date and decided to put it off. So in the event we didn’t have to break any leases or contracts or anything of that nature. All we had to do was close our bank account--we still have those old Japanese debit cards in a little box on my wife’s dresser. Perhaps the apartment thing was because they had reservations about me but the phone and the tickets for that summer were in my hands and it’s strange they didn’t pan out. Providence, perhaps. He gives and takes away.

No more talk about travel after that. A few months after we got back to our hometown my wife got pregnant and moved on.

Back in 2019 I went over to the UK and France for an academic conference, alone. Now I am off to the UK and Germany for an academic conference alone. In a month I will be off to the UK again for a semester, alone. I’m sitting in the airport now next to a carry-on bag my wife and I bought in the Narita Airport in Tokyo in March of 2013 on our way home to replace the one we’d brought over. Stopped right in the airport to unpack the old bag, pack the new bag, and put the old bag in the trash.

The flight is boarding in twenty minutes.

I don’t like travel