It’s 11:01 P.M. on December 6th and rain is pounding occasionally on the window. It sounds like fingertips over a hard surface in rapid tattoo.
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to blog. I feel like I’ve been floating through my life lately, overcome in certain corners of the city or the UEA campus by love for the surrounding, for the country, for the idea that I’ve intercepted a dream with my body. I think this is why it’s been difficult to write. I’ve been in the mood to curl up and watch the snow fall, or the rain, wrapped in a blanket, and think without self-mediating. It’s not easy not to self-mediate when you’re writing out your thoughts and you can see what you’re thinking or who you are in certain glimmers.
A week from today I will have been in London for about twelve hours and I will have left Norwich behind. Perhaps for good. My heart really hurts at that possibility. Amidst all the throws of homesickness I think I found comfort in the trees and large lawns and the churches and the small-town mentality of the busses, which run on whatever schedule they please. This country has been, contrary to logic, in my heart for so much of my life and part of me wants to go back and start over, have another chance in another life where I’m smarter, more graceful, better-equipped to encounter all that the country has to offer, the people and the traditions and the weird food and the strange mentality that every British person seems to share that there is intense comfort and delight to be found in small things: a good cup of tea, a sunny day, a hot meal.
And I look back, too, wondering, or almost wondering, about how it would have been like for me here if I were any different than who I was when I got here and I’m overcome with an overwhelming fear that this experience could be taken from me. At the base of it, underneath all my self-doubt and the boredom and the strangeness and uncomfortableness of being beyond familiar turf, I have had an amazing time here and I’m loathe to leave. I’ve packed the bulk of my things but I’ve left out litter--bus tickets, makeup, perfume, tea cups, everything--I think because it makes me sad to consider leaving. These little things are signals that I still belong in this place. My journal in the left-hand corner of this desk is definitely mine, and belongs on this surface, at least for a little while longer.
I am really looking forward to being home but I feel, while walking around Norwich for the last few days I’m here in conceivably forever, a strange nostalgia and a desperation to spend the last few days well. It’s a grasping at the current moment inside of the current moment and it really hurts. I can’t tell what parts of it are regret--wishes that I’d spent a bit more time having coffee at the riverside--and what parts of it are regular sadness at departing from a wonderful portion of life. The feeling reminds me a little of the way I felt walking across the football field at high school graduation, except I may have loved this place more intensely in individual moments than I loved high school.
I think most people would end this kind of post with a list of things they’re thankful for about the trip and it might look like this: the friends I made, the memories I made, etc. Many exclamation points and saccharine reminiscences.
My list is not that list. This is the first real thing I’ve ever actually accomplished outside of the realm of scholarship and I feel, for the first time in my life, like I’m not staring into the abyss of real life without some tools to defend myself with. Sometimes when I consider the reality of what I’ve done--how far I actually am from home physically--I almost don’t believe it. How did I manage to get myself over here? How did I fly to a country in which I’d never set foot in and live here for three months on my own? How did I feed myself, how did I manage to tuck in the tags that stuck up in the back of my shirts or jumpers, how did I take a train to a different country, how did I fly to Dublin and back, how did I learn how to stand on the tube, how am I still alive, here, so far away, on my own? How is it possible that I’ve detached from home and lived a life apart from it? I’ve never done that. I go to a college thirty minutes up the freeway from my childhood home and I live there in the school year. The cat I’ve had since I was five is still my best friend. I’m closer to my parents than any people my age. And I’ve left all of that behind and I’ve done something that I just really can’t wrap my head around when I think about the probability of me being able to do it.
I know I’ll come home in a couple weeks and, apart from being happy for dry climates and the familiar scents of San Juan Capistrano and Irvine in the sunshine, in the heat, and the brief spastic showers that we call rain; I know I will still be a house of insecurities all kind of shaking around inside of me and I’ll still be the same girl in the same skin with the same worries. But I will also have these three months of fending for myself and having to really interrogate my beliefs and habits and lifestyle. I’m an introvert--I like spending time alone. I enjoy that privacy. But to spend the greater part of three months with myself and my brain and my illogical heart with its intense bursts of love for unnamable things in the air or across the lakes or the countryside visible from the train windows or the small patches of little white flowers in the Scottish hills--has been exhausting. I am accountable only to myself.
But I think I’ve learned a lot--in things I can’t quite say. I know now some concrete things: like, you’re able to understand public transportation. You’re able to ride a train by yourself to Edinburgh and you’re able to get yourself safe when stranded in Northumberland at midnight. You can buy your own groceries and not die of malnutrition. You can buy your own medicine and nurse yourself out of a mid-term cold. And you can accept who you’ve become in the quiet and the still moments of your life. You can be at peace with that inner turbulence and longing and you can make sense of some things that happen and you can really, if you want to, be an optimist.
And I think--I don’t know, I think I’ve learned how to be grateful. I seem to feel things in flashes, and I feel grateful in flashes, really deep, right in the chest. It’s incredible--I really can’t comprehend the opportunity I’ve been given and I hope that, even if I don’t know until I’m home and I’m remembering, I’ve taken advantage of it. I hope I can use this experience to somehow bless other people. I feel I’ve learned things I can’t yet understand. There’s this idea that sometimes we encounter knowledge or art that we’re not ready for yet, that someday we’ll perfect. I think this has been one of those things; every day has been full of those things.
I was lying in bed earlier tonight looking around me at the suitcases and the scant bookshelves and the circular sticker on the top right corner of my mirror that says “THE GRASSHOPPER - AMSTERDAM” that was here when I got here and I remembered walking through a part of town called “the Royal Arcade” and encountering a lone man singing in a clear, beautiful voice, a song in Latin. I don’t know what it was, but it touched me deeply, and I looked up at the grey, stone edifice of Norwich Castle opposite me, up on a hill, and thought--how bizarre! That I’m here! And I stood for a moment in front of the outdoor stage in a small ampitheatre near the castle, read some plaques, walked to the castle mall foodcourt and ordered a vegetarian sandwich. I sat and watched three teenagers dissect a baked potato (jacket potato) at a neighboring table against the backdrop of white skies and the rooftops of city buildings, and another far-off mall. It was a beautiful, perfect day. I remember it in sea-glass greens and gradient gray, the undersides of clouds and the white sky lit behind by the sun.
I look forward to a lot of things about home; seeing my family, having Christmas together, going back to school and work...but I think I also look forward to seeing how this self re-encounters my past self’s life. I’m not saying I’m a different person in a large enough way that I’ll be living in a stranger’s routine until it becomes mine again. I just wonder--when I look at the lights on the Christmas tree, are they going to remind me of the lights flat 20 hung in the kitchen next door that I can see from far away when I walk home from class in the dark?--a soft, yellowing light, in a string of speckles across the dark glass above a hand-written sign: HAPPY CHRISTMAS
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