I awake in the middle of the night, disoriented. My foggy mind tries to piece together the outline of the door, a window, the blinking green light on my computer. After a few minutes, I realize I am at my parent’s home in Austin, Texas. I am not in Miriam’s apartment in Hannover, or on Chris’ couch in Giessen. There are no sounds of a Greek late-night show coming in on a breeze through the open window. This is not a hotel room in Frankfurt with my American friend in the next bed. It is not a youth hostel, with seven of my American friends in bunk beds. There is no quiet snoring on a gently vibrating tour bus. I haven’t even fallen asleep in class at Leibnitz University.
No, I am home. Or at least that’s how it would appear.
But there have been times in the past week when a sudden anger and frustration have welled up inside of me, bringing hot tears to my face. All I can think is, “I want to go home.”
Beginning our descent into the airport, the plane circled over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ah, look, here are the suburbs again. Here are the cities that sprawl for miles. Here are the trucks and SUVs, the giant parking lots, the Wal-Marts and Targets and HEBs. Here is impervious cover and smog and coal-fired power plants.
Ok, so maybe I was sleep-deprived and exhausted while thinking this. But I realized that as much as America is home and as much as this place is familiar and comfortable – I am a traveler.
As I never have before, I feel the need to go, to break away from routines and escape those places I can navigate with my eyes closed. I want to be scared and sometimes hurt, my heart pounding with adrenaline, crying some days with homesickness but most days with joy, moved by the beauty of every land I can never own. I want to belong not to a place but to myself, finding again and again that quiet self-reliance. Lost in my own thoughts and feelings, I want to walk through a city in fascination with the way everything fits – or doesn’t. I want to know if I fit, there, anywhere.
I’m not really sure what else to tell you. Here I am. I’m not the girl who left Texas almost two months ago. I’m more impatient, curious, introspective and assertive. I sway my hips when I walk. I say “yes” more often than “no.”
I’ll be back on the road again soon enough. Until then, every day will be an adventure as I look for my identity as a world citizen, an American, a student, a woman, a poet, a planner, a tree-hugger, and whatever other label I decide to take, leave, or shatter.
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."
– G. K. Chesterton
No, I am home. Or at least that’s how it would appear.
But there have been times in the past week when a sudden anger and frustration have welled up inside of me, bringing hot tears to my face. All I can think is, “I want to go home.”
Beginning our descent into the airport, the plane circled over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ah, look, here are the suburbs again. Here are the cities that sprawl for miles. Here are the trucks and SUVs, the giant parking lots, the Wal-Marts and Targets and HEBs. Here is impervious cover and smog and coal-fired power plants.
Ok, so maybe I was sleep-deprived and exhausted while thinking this. But I realized that as much as America is home and as much as this place is familiar and comfortable – I am a traveler.
As I never have before, I feel the need to go, to break away from routines and escape those places I can navigate with my eyes closed. I want to be scared and sometimes hurt, my heart pounding with adrenaline, crying some days with homesickness but most days with joy, moved by the beauty of every land I can never own. I want to belong not to a place but to myself, finding again and again that quiet self-reliance. Lost in my own thoughts and feelings, I want to walk through a city in fascination with the way everything fits – or doesn’t. I want to know if I fit, there, anywhere.
I’m not really sure what else to tell you. Here I am. I’m not the girl who left Texas almost two months ago. I’m more impatient, curious, introspective and assertive. I sway my hips when I walk. I say “yes” more often than “no.”
I’ll be back on the road again soon enough. Until then, every day will be an adventure as I look for my identity as a world citizen, an American, a student, a woman, a poet, a planner, a tree-hugger, and whatever other label I decide to take, leave, or shatter.
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."
– G. K. Chesterton