On Thursday morning Capt. T and I walked to the Ogaki train station in the snow so he could catch the 5:15 AM train to the airport. I came back to my apartment and fell asleep, only to wake up to the sad reminders of his absence: the Christmas gifts he gave me last night sitting on the coffee table, the bottle of Coke in the refrigerator, the toilet seat left up. Everything felt cold and empty.

He was here for two weeks. We went to Magome and Tsumago, two preserved Edo-period villages in the mountains, and took a three-day excursion to Kyoto, where we stayed in a ryokan, visited lots of temples and ate Kyoto-style sushi. Back in Ogaki, we huddled around the kerosene heater, watching DVDs and drinking mint tea, while the snow fell outside. On his last day, he came to school with me and we taught a lesson together, which concluded with him autographing a pile of dictionaries for my clamoring students, who pronounced him "cool!" and "hot!" and "tall!" Last night we exchanged Christmas gifts and ate Christmas cake (a white cake decorated with whipped cream and strawberries), celebrating Christmas the couple-y way that is the tradition in Japan.

I can't say the visit was easy or what I expected at all. I didn't know what it would feel like, after building a life for four months without him, to have him step into that life. I suppose I expected it would be like we had pushed the Pause button at the end of July and the day he arrived we would push the Play button and everything would be fine. But it wasn't like that. There was awkwardness for me, a feeling of distance, which didn't diminish until the end of the first week. I was annoyingly moody. It was hard to be the navigator all the time, the asker of questions in broken Japanese, the timekeeper, the schedule-maker. I grew tired of being in charge.

But by the second week, things were better and felt more natural. The change wasn't painless, but by then we had both realized the situation was probably pretty normal for two people in a relationship that spans the globe. Now that he's back in LA, and I am facing a long, cold winter without him, I wonder why I didn't spend every moment he was here reminding him how amazing I think he is, how happy he makes me, how much I love being his girlfriend. Now that he's gone, I'm counting down the days until I visit him in March, and we'll be back in the town that belongs to us, surrounded by memories both terrible and wonderful. We'll dance and wear eyeliner and eat so much Mexican food. And I'll tell him all the things I forgot to say while he was here.

So this whole winter thing is completely new to me. In southern California, where I spent every winter up to now, the temperature rarely dips below 50 degrees, and I can remember many winters with 80-degree days. Scarves and hats were purely for fashion. I never had to wear more than one pair of pants at a time.

Winter in Japan is a whole different story. Japanese houses and apartments are built to withstand the summer heat and humidity, so they are airy and well-ventilated. That means drafty and bone-chillingly cold in the winter. Old apartments like mine do not come equipped with a heating system -- instead, I have a small kerosene heater which warms a room surprisingly fast, but spews an unmistakable gas odor that made me feel a little nauseous for the first week I used it. It would be impossible to heat my whole apartment with this little thing, so I shut the sliding wooden doors of the living room and warm only that room until right before bed, when I also warm up the bedroom. Every venture outside of the living room -- to make dinner, to pee, to get dressed in the morning, to brush my teeth -- is an icy undertaking, best done with gritted teeth and a dose of resolve. I can see my breath in every room. After a shower, my skin steams. Bare feet on the linoleum floor is pure madness.

But there's something great about real winters, despite the lack of insulation. Sitting cozily in my living room watching the falling snow transform the ugly parking lot of my apartment building into something almost lovely, it's impossible to not feel happy. The flat rice fields are now perfectly white, like stretches of unbitten marshmallow. The bare trees are crisp with ice. And I am actually knitting for a purpose. It's weird, but I like it.

(Though ask me again in February, after I've endured three months of this.)

Some thoughts on this, my first Japanese Christmas Eve:

1. My stalker student made me a Christmas card, something I discouraged quite vigorously when he proposed it in our Christmas-card-making class. A snippet of the conversation:

Creepy Kid: Excuse me! Who should I give this card to?
Me: One of your friends. Anyone.
Creepy Kid: How about YOU?
Me: (gesturing wildly around the room) No! Give it to someone in the class.
Creepy Kid: I see...

Later, when I peeked over his shoulder and saw what he was writing, I knew it was all over. This is it in its entirety:

I wish your good Chritmas
You are very kindness and pretty.
Your classes is the best subject anything else.
I send poem just for you!

P.S. Take care your health.

I especially like the indignant tone of "If you think like that, where is he now?" It almost sounds like an atheist questioning a hardcore Christian. "Where is your Santa Claus god now?!"

Also, when he came to the office to give me my card, he said, "Shall I read it to you?" and I said, "NO!" and took it from him. He seemed quite ruffled.

2. My school's bonenkai (end-of-year party) was on Thursday and it was great. I sat next to the man in charge of school lunches, who had previously expressed surprise at the fact that I always order the school lunch and therefore eat Japanese food every day. Apparently my predecessor was more picky. On Thursday night, he was in for a real shock: not only did I know the proper drink-pouring etiquette (never pour your own drinks and top off the drinks of everyone around you before they have a chance to empty their glasses), I also drank Japanese beer AND ate all the Japanese food served at the dinner! Every time a teacher stopped by to fill his glass, he'd point at me and say something like, "Fill her glass too. She drinks!"

By the end of the night, he had pronounced me "charming," "pretty" and "fascinating," and expressed the wish that I work at their school "forever." (Much of this was translated to me by the various English teachers who stopped by.) He also said he would propose to me if he was thirty years younger. And he wanted to sing a karaoke duet with me, but we didn't know any the same songs.

You know what I like about Japan? The fact that you can be deemed utterly charming by just drinking a lot and eating all the food on your plate.

3. Let's say you were all alone on Christmas Eve, but really really wanted to eat Christmas cake because it combines all your favorite dessert elements and you don't think it will be so easy to get at the store at any other time of the year. If you bought the sponge cake and whipping cream and strawberries and decorated a whole Christmas cake just for yourself to eat alone on Christmas Eve, would that be sad?

What if it looked like this?

I think it would be perfectly understandable.

(I didn't eat the whole thing.)

Whether male or female, the citizens of Japan love to adorn their cell phones with all manner of jangling items, from tiny plastic replicas of ramen to stuffed animals five times the size of the cell phone itself. When I first got here, I thought it was stupid to hang a bunch of crap off your phone, but then I found Domo-kun. And now there's no turning back.