The hole punch clicked as it pierced the thin plastic of my residence card. “Sabishii desu ne,” said the immigration officer at Haneda Airport as she voided my residency—we’ll miss you. It was only a small hole, barely 6 mm across, but it might as well have been straight through the heart.

There was something absurd about it: an administrative procedure carrying the emotional weight of an ending. I moved through boarding half a step outside myself. As the evening flight lifted into the dark, I looked down at the nightscape once more, and it dawned on me—though I had decided to leave, I was more attached to Tokyo than I had realised.

Growing attached to, and later missing, a person is easy enough to recognise. We can also name, with some clarity, the absence of certain sensations: tastes, sounds, the feel of air against the skin. Routines, too, become objects of longing. Inevitably, whole periods of time recede into eras, taking with them earlier versions of ourselves, whose loss we occasionally mourn. Missing a place, though, collects all of this at once—person, sensation, routine, self—giving the feeling its particular astringency and complexity.