Member-only story

It’s okay to be tired

Zelda Kasahara
3 min readFeb 11, 2020

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Photo by Úrsula Madariaga from Pexels

I remember when I was traveling Iceland over New Year and on my last day of my short trip I went into this souvenir shop to get some last small presents for me and my family.

I grabbed the usual things a tourist would buy and proceeded to the cashier where a young woman with really tired eyes and messy hair was staring at her phone. She was probably a student. Looking younger and at the same time older than me. She didn’t realize that I wanted to pay and I was too shy to say anything.

Years of living in Japan have made me behave awkward around bad service. I don’t know how to handle it anymore, it’s like forgetting a foreign language you once have learned.

The girl finally realizes me and she sighs while scanning the souvenirs I intended to buy.

“It has been a long day!” she said and me, still a bit awkward in finding a good answer said
“I can imagine.”

But that was actually a lie. I couldn’t imagine. I finally had a three day vacation after a long year of working as a nursery teacher in Tokyo and the last three days I just spend with eating really good food, diving into a new culture I was just starting to like and fall in love with. I came back from an amazing day trip around the Golden Circle while seeing beautiful sunrises and waterfalls, and in the evening relaxing with…

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Zelda Kasahara
Zelda Kasahara

Written by Zelda Kasahara

Writer & editor based in Iceland / 日本語・English・Deutsch / Language teacher, translator, editor.

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