Returning Home

Last Night in Selly Oak.

I expected to miss England. I expected to miss my house, my neighborhood, Selly Park, my favorite spot in the library on the 3^rd floor. I expected to miss trains, walking 30 minutes to get anywhere, English accents, electric kettles, tea, pubs, my cupboard of a room. I expected to miss Canvas and Subway City on Tuesdays, Improv and Snobs on Wednesdays, Canvas and Nightingale’s on Thursdays, and house parties, whether planned or spontaneous, Mondays through Saturdays. I expected to miss being so close to Europe. I expected to miss saying “proper,” “knackered,” and “I can’t be bothered.” I expected to miss-so-deeply-that-it-is-more-appropriate-to-call-it-grieving the people who I held closer than the shirt on my back but could not pack into my suitcases along with my socks and worn jeans.

But I was wrong. After the first week home, I realized I did not miss a thing; I did not miss a single person. I had expected sadness. I had expected nostalgia. I had expected grief even, but I felt none of those things.

All I felt was anger.

Seething, aimless, full-bodied anger. I wanted to lash out, fists flying at whatever or whoever yanked me back to this country and threw me so seamlessly back into my old life. It was as though I cannonballed off the tallest high-dive and landed in the water below without a splash or even causing a ripple.

I returned home to America and everything was exactly as I left it eight months ago. The same house. The same street. The same bedroom. The same Tennessee summer heat. The same cashiers at the grocery store. Even the dust powdering my dresser seemed to stay at the same untended thickness.

It was as though England never happened, as though those eight months of life never existed, and all I had to show for them were pictures of someone who looks a lot like me with people who I think I’ve seen somewhere before in places I imagined going. At best, those months were a dream or perhaps a memory woven from wishes of an adventure that never began.

Three weeks ago from today on May 23, 2011, belted inside a winged metal tube, I catapulted from the life I had lived for eight months back to the life I had lived for 20 years. It took only a few hours, and once those hours were over, I was expected to go back to my old life, to slide right in as though those eight months across the Atlantic had never occurred. And that is exactly what I did. I landed. I reeled from culture shock for a brief moment. I hugged my family. And the next day, I began an internship with the Nashville Children’s Theatre. I worked every weekday. I spent the weekends with my family. I saw a few friends. I slipped right back into my life as though my shadow had stayed behind, keeping my place, knowing I would return exactly the same.

But I am not the same person who left here in September 2010. Between then and now, eight months of life passed during which I created a life in England; I traveled the UK and parts of Europe, mostly on my own; I performed slam poetry at Hit the Ode; I pulled myself out of a depression; I waged war against my second biggest fear—self worth; I turned 21; I discovered a little more about who/what/how God is; I learned more about myself, about people, and about the world; and I lived more opportunity than whole lifetimes contain. But this place doesn’t recognize those eight months or what happened during that time. Only the mirror offers slight acknowledgement, reflecting longer hair and paler skin, but that is where its generosity ends.

People keep asking me, “How was England? How was England?” I don’t know how to answer them. How do I answer how eight months of my life “was”? So I give them the short-answer, “England was life-changing.” What that means would take hours to explain. 

Before I left England, I was a facebook addict. Then, I returned to America and avoided facebook for consecutive days. I did not want to see the people who I had not wanted to leave. I did not want to see their faces frozen in still images when I was used to seeing them next to me, breathing, speaking, laughing, changing with life’s animation. Then there are the pictures from socials, parties, and encounters taken after I left, pictures that I would have been in but was instead thousands of miles away where the people  in the pictures couldn’t follow me. Now, this place can’t accommodate the person who returned. How could it accommodate them, ones who had never been here? Those pictures on facebook hurt. Sometimes, it is a sharp, hot punch in the stomach; other times, it is a raw, heavy ache in the gut. Either way, I don’t want to feel that hurt.

I suck at this transition.

I rarely cry, and when I do, I usually tell myself, “Of all the things in life to cry over, this is not one of them.” Now, I have a self-excusable reason to cry, and I have yet to well-up, much less shed a tear. I got the closest to crying at my farewell party, but even then no tears came.

Yesterday, almost three weeks after returning home, I finally finished unpacking. Since third grade, I have kept a memory box of each school year, and my junior year in England was no exception. I went through that memory box yesterday, sifting through bus tickets, plane tickets, train tickets, play tickets, play programs, postcards, letters, travel itineraries, notes, maps…Then, I shoved the contents back into the box and slammed the heavy cardboard on my desk. It hurt. It hurt too much to go through those memories. If I cried at appropriate times, then I would have cried then. Instead, I put my palm to my chest, expecting it to pass right through space and into the air where my back should have been, but was surprised when it was stopped by warm solid, thinking at first that it must have been some trick, some fault in physics, because for a moment, I just felt empty, seeing faces, so many faces of people who I do not want to have to learn what life is like without them just down the street, across the road, four blocks away.

They had a life to stay in England for. I had a life to return to America for.

They never planned on my coming; then they were surprised at the reality of my going.

But I planned two distinct, deliberate dates of arriving and departing: September 25, 2010 arrival; May 23, 2011 departure. My time always had an expiration date; it always existed on a count-down. I planned it that way.

But I didn’t plan for what happened in between.

I didn’t plan on falling in love with my life there; I didn’t plan for this pain of leaving that life.

As much as this pain hurts, I thank God for it twice as much as it aches. Because studying abroad was the hardest thing I had ever done, and this pain means that it was worthwhile— every moment of it.

Today, driving home from work, hot Tennessee wind in my face, sun setting to my right, and a country song crooning its whiskey sadness through the airwaves, I pictured myself going back to BSC this fall after being away for a year. I saw the bell tower. I saw the theatre. I saw the fountain, the library. I saw the Norton building. And for the first time since my family first drove onto BSC’s small grounds my senior year of high school, BSC didn’t feel like mine anymore. I had loved BSC like a best friend, and now it belonged to someone else, to the people who stayed, to the ones who will say they had four years there, not a broken three like me.

And for the first time since I returned to America, I felt that time abroad; I felt that year, those eight months. And it wasn’t an absence; it wasn’t a void; and it certainly was not a dream. That year finally felt real, warm and close by, as though if I stuck my hand out the window, I could run my fingers through its days, slide my hand along its highs and lows, feel the cooling and warming of the seasons. I could touch it, hold on to it, because it was real. It did happen.

Finally, that year, my year had landed. I spent the last three weeks so afraid that I had forgotten to pack it with me. But there it was, settling down, making itself comfortable, taking up space in my life. That year, that time was so big, so real, so full that it took me three whole weeks to pull it out of England, across the ocean, through North Carolina, and into the heart of Tennessee. I wrapped my arms around it, burying my face into it. Thank you for coming back to me.

P.S. I am now back to checking facebook. And I do miss people. I miss them/you terribly.

Every happiness is the child of separation

it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,

becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

My First View of England: September 26, 2010