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.