I'm on my way home from Kulmbach now, and being stuck on a German train for 5 hours has given me some time to think. I guess this is one of those flowery posts you save for the grandkids about life at large, so if you want to skip this one I won't hold it against you.
Sometimes you get this feeling that you know something in your life is missing, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. I think I’ve come to realize that you sometimes get this feeling when whatever you’re missing has been right in front you the whole time. This semester something’s felt a little off, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. Having been to Europe many times before, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t homesickness, and the culture shock wasn’t really that strong. I’ve just felt like I was trying to get something out of the experience, and I think I’ve finally found it. It’s really dumb, actually, but it was the ability to say goodbye.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a weird fascination with Europe. Same with German – even in 7th grade when we had to take that foreign language course, I somehow knew I wanted to spend more time on the German part. I didn’t have any super skills or anything, it just kind of clicked. Then came high school. Somehow or another I figured out a way to make 4 years of German work with 3 years of coursework, and what’s more, I landed a trip to Germany out of it. God, I still don’t think I’m over that summer – all of the people, the friends, family, trips, school, everything – here I am studying in Vienna, and after 4 months of living there, I still get all giddy when I travel to Kulmbach for just a week. I know there’s no way to recreate what happened before, but I still just simply cannot imagine what my life would be like without this experience. Since then, I think I’ve spent about a third of my life abroad, and I am absolutely loving it. If there’s nothing else I’ve learned from my study abroad experience so far, it’s that your dreams are not nearly as far away as you think they are. What seemed like a pipe dream just 5 years ago has more than become a reality – I’m LIVING in Europe. Every major capital city I read about in European history is just a stone’s throw away. It’s all in my home turf now. I’ve been traveling around to different countries and continents looking for what was missing, not knowing that I wasn’t really missing anything at all, I just wasn’t looking at it. I think at this point what’s lacking is an enumerated plan of what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. And I think there’s a good reason that’s lacking – I don’t want to know that any one time I do something is without a doubt the last time I’ll have that experience. As stupid as it sounds, I’m thinking it might all go back to the first time I was in Kulmbach – leaving on the last day was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but right before I left, my host brother told me “It’s just goodbye, that doesn’t mean we won’t see each other again, duh!” Simple words with a profound meaning, if you ask me.
As I sit in a train watching the Bavarian landscape go by, I think I’ve finally come to realize that saying goodbye is just a natural part of life’s happenings. It doesn’t mean see you soon, see you later, or even see you at all. It just means the end of an experience, nothing more, nothing less. No one (not even me) can tell whether or not something is going to happen later in life, and I’ve finally come to realize how great that really is.
