Duty and tears

I don't remember so many extended crying times before I came to Japan. Even after walking away from my parents and boyfriend in the airport, it only took me a few steps inside security to compose myself and start looking forward--first looking for my boarding gate, then looking for my seat aboard the aircraft, then tracking on the inflight map forward, forward, forward...to Japan.

The one time that I simply broke down and sobbed was the night I was watching the movie "The Bodyguard." I was curled up in my university dorm room with my cousin, my boyfriend, and some others, and we were having a "movie night." The movie, if you haven't seen it, tells the story of a pop singer who has been receiving threatening notes, etc., and a former Secret Service agent is hired to protect her. The whole story is full of themes about duty, fear, trust, and relationship...I actually don't remember so much of the story in general, but the final scene is still engraved on my mind--the secret service agent and the singer are parting ways, with the singer's safety secured and the agent's job done. The singer's plane is pulling away, and she's looking stone-faced ahead, but then suddenly she calls out, "Stop the plane!", runs back to the agent, hurls herself into his arms and there is, for a few moments, the traditional movie's "happy ending"... I watched the ending and simply burst into tears. I knew that my plane was going to Japan, and I knew that I wasn't going to say, "Stop the plane!"...no matter who I was leaving.

Last night I "skimmed" through the movie "Roman Holiday" and found myself having flashbacks to the time of watching "The Bodyguard"... Roman Holiday is a quality classic about a princess who escapes for a day, meets an American man in Rome, and experiences all kinds of "living" that she hadn't yet been able to experience. In the end, she has to leave the man and go back to the palace to undertake her duty...but as she turns and says goodbye to the man, even though she'd only known him for one day, she cries, and kisses him. Later she says that she'll remember her one day in Rome her whole life. When she comes back to the palace and is being chided for forgetting her duty to her country and people, she responds by saying something like, "Please don't say that word again! Why else would I have come back, if it weren't for the fact that I know without a doubt my duty..." (ok, that's just what I remember...not a word-for-word quote at all!)

I didn't cry when I watched the ending of "Roman Holiday," but I feel as though the heroine's tears are somehow inside my heart. My life isn't my own...I have a duty, of sorts, and so I can't choose to come back here and go to grad school, and I can't choose to go hide in a cave, and I can't choose just to go back home and hang out with friends...I believe that God is good, and that He'll lead to pleasant places...but when I say goodbye to here, even if it's only been a little over 2 years of my life spent here, it'll be with tears...