I Don't Know How to Say Goodbye in English
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Notes From Abroad
April 25, 2008 - 12:00amIt is an interesting writing environment when you are stranded in Rome and the only thing for you to do is wait and hope for some divine act and ... write your last abroad column?
Yes, well, soldier on mate.
Through life you will have these moments — moments where you are sitting on a sleeping bag on top of a hostel bunk, but you are still concerned about some awful sort of skin disease, moments when you feel abandoned because your mom, sister and guy you were supposed to meet up with yesterday can not figure out there is a reason you are not responding — because you can not — and that they need to call. These are moments where you are numb with doubt.
Not the kind of doubt you have when you are standing in an Italian grocery store holding cheese called “OK Sandwich” and asking yourself if you are, as yet, that desperate — because make no doubt about it, you are. No, it is the kind of doubt when staring at the dome of an ancient cathedral, framed by a dusk sky made all the more brilliantly blue by the cottonball clouds rolling across it, and the barely detectable black vs of hundreds of birds.
“OK Sandwich,” you are thinking as you chew, along with ponderings of how close you must be to the ocean, hearing the sea gulls squawk overhead.
It is that same kind of doubt — the doubt you have when you are standing with the big blue of the ocean spread out in front of you, edges further than your senses can reach. You are small, you are not the center of the world, and you wonder if it is just too big and too much. You want to curl up in your borrowed sleeping bag and hope everything has worked itself out when you wake up to Italian techno blaring from the front desk in the morning.
I am a month away from being thrown back into the world I know after being wrenched from the one I have come to know, and I am so confused about the general state of my sanity and self I am not quite sure if I am being forced back into captivity or if I am voluntarily running back to its comforts with open arms. I am a year away from being thrown into the world I have not yet come to know — The Real One — from the one I know too well, the sheltered shady spaces of an Ivy League quadrangle.
When you go home from abroad, you do not doubt the wider world will continue on without you, same as it always was. What you doubt is that you will ever be the same. It is not something you, the reader (not the hypothetical second person), can understand, and neither is it something I can articulate, sitting here on this hostel bunk with an empty inbox on my crummy British phone feeling a bit like the weight of the world.
The only one who can truly understand of course, is The Queen.
So cheers, you saucy minx — keep the kettle on for me; I have lots of doubts, but none that I will be back.