This is gonna be tough.

I found out today that I can't cry and speak Japanese at the same time. When I tried, only strange sound combinations came out of my mouth. Hopefully those present just assumed I was speaking unfamiliar English.

Today I had my last visit to Yamazaki Minami Elementary School. Somehow I thought it would be easier than last Friday's final visit to Nishidai Elementary; it wasn't. The minute I walked through the front door of the school this morning, a fifth-grade girl spotted me and began imploring, "Please, don't go back to America." By the end of fourth period, when the same girl erupted into sobs and the teacher and some of her classmates joined in, I finally gave into the pressure of the moment and let the tears fall. When the principal came by the room after the lesson to thank me for my hard work, I found myself temporarily rendered mute. Finally, I managed to squeak out a "Thank you." In English.

I know that a lot of it is just to be polite: the teachers going on and on about how much they will miss me, the principal telling me that she felt she and I had made a special connection, the children shyly passing me letters that thank me for all the "fun English" I taught them over the past two years. But each of these gestures strikes a resonant emotional chord in me. To them, my going home to America is a bit sad; but, from my perspective, it's my whole life. They are saying goodbye to just me; I'm saying goodbye to hundreds of children and their teachers, all of whom have held an integral role in constructing my experience in this country. I feel so much pressure--most of it coming from my own end--to imbue these final days with meaning. To make every moment count. But each goodbye I say is a little unsatisfying: there's no momentous sense of moving on from one era of my life to the next. It just sort of slips sloppily by, with a few sniffles, an awkwardly elongated procession of bowing, and me, regretting that I don't know the proper formulaic Japanese phrase for this sort of situation, settling with just saying that I'm grateful, and then not even doing that properly.

As sad and difficult as it is to say goodbye, both today and last Friday, as I rode my bike down that specific route home from elementary school for the last time, there was also a sense of relief at being done. Even though, over the last year, my elementary school visits have transformed from something to be dreaded to my favorite part of my profession, I'm still very unsatisfied with my job in general. At junior high school I'm rendered useless by the main English teachers' determination to exclude me as much as possible from the actual practice of teaching. And, while elementary school proves to be much more personally rewarding in the fact that I get to design my own lesson plans and teach most of the lesson on my own, maintaining a physical energy and vocal volume sufficient to hold the attention of a classroom full of young children is so exhausting that I could never see myself sticking with it long-term. I'm looking forward to being finished with all of it.

But I'm not looking forward to saying goodbye to two more elementary schools and--the big kahuna--Yamazaki Junior High School, where I've spent Monday through Thursday every week for the past two years, developing relationships and learning a lot about Japanese culture and about myself. I'm planning to give my goodbye speech in Japanese. I just hope, when it comes time for me to do so, I'm able to get the words out.