I had another great and fun chat with Zian late last night, this set me at ease and I actually slept really well. I think I went to bed just after midnight, woke up at 2 am and went to bed again, and then popped back up wide awake a little after 7 am. I feel a lot better in general today. No tears at all, and while I had sad feelings well up in me twice during the day, I fought it down both times, and for the rest of the day I wasn’t even close to losing it. I feel relatively normal now, like a haze has been lifted from my mind. Not that I don’t still miss Zian and our fun times terribly, but I’m also no longer feeling completely dead inside or anything like that. I’m a functioning adult again! Amazing. I feel like this was what I had expected myself to feel on our first day of separation, two days ago. And maybe what a normal person would have felt.

I’ve been playing a bit of Persona 5 now that I don’t have school stuff hanging over my head like a Sword of Damocles, and this quote that I came across seemed relevant:

No one can ever be replaced, yet we need to keep pushing towards our future – Maruki, Persona 5

This is my last full day in Japan, and I think I’m more than ready to go back now so I can process everything that has happened before I come back again in three months for my Sophia year here. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel very wistful about leaving Japan still though. Despite feeling a lot better, I still wasn’t feeling 100%, and had no appetite whatsoever, so I skipped both breakfast and lunch and just bought something back to my room for dinner.

Other than that, my last day was spent in Akihabara looking for stuff to bring back with me like any good tourist, and there isn’t a ton to report because I just burnt 5 hours or so in 3 second-hand CD shops there and bought about 12 CDs to add to my stash, and that was it. I don’t have a very big bag to carry home after all, nor do I go to Akihabara for figurines and manga like many other people do.

Akihabara.

I’ve been here quite a few times now, the latest before today being at the start of this trip, on Day 1. It was nice and sunny today though, at least up until I was on my way home, which contrasts the last two times that I visited Akihabara, both visits of which were accompanied by fairly strong rain.

I wandered in and out of the three major second-hand CD shops in Akihabara — Suruga-ya, Book-Off, and Lashinbang, seeing super expensive CDs like this:

Those super expensive CDs were wedged between shelves and rows of CDs ranging from 300 to 1500 yen or so. They were mostly the cheaper ones, thank goodness. A friend who is more in tune with Touhou music than I am said that that above CD is apparently even on Apple Music and Spotify for streaming… yet it’s so pricey for the single physical CD with 3 songs and a clear case with no designs or booklets.

I also walked around a tiny bit, popping my head into things like a Square Enix cafe and goods shop:

But it’s been a long time since I’ve played any FFXIV, or any other Square Enix game. I didn’t bite on anything there or elsewhere, besides the CDs.

The only other thing of note that happened today is that I finally stopped by a shop for dinner on the way home, as it started drizzling. For my final dinner in Japan, I picked some random bento box shop called Kitchen Origin:

And had the bento when I got home:

It wasn’t very good, or maybe I just didn’t have much taste since I didn’t really have an appetite despite feeling hungry, if that makes any sense.

I also saw this on the way home:

Someone wrote messages on someone else’s attempt to leave their stuff out for garbage pickup and disposal day, assumedly because they put the wrong things out today. Not sure if a garbage collector did it (do they even have that sort of time while doing the rounds?) or some local nosy person or some sort of in-between inspector or something.

Lastly, here are the CDs I bought:

Three of those CDs are from Kiroro — a musical duet that Zian really, really likes, apparently. Virtually all the songs she karaoke’d at me on Day 19 were from them. I bought the CDs to listen to them in honour of her and in an attempt to try out and maybe also fall in love with something that someone I consider a dear friend likes.

Ijou desu. That’s it. I’m already basically fully packed up and ready to leave the house tomorrow, so there’s nothing else to say. What’s this? A nice, quick, blog entry! With no typoes even at its first publishing! I hope. (Next day edit: Satinel found one even though I triple-checked it. Darn it.)