“So, how was Ireland?” It’s the standard question people feel obliged to ask me after returning from studying abroad. My friends welcomed me back to Philadelphia with warm smiles, eager to resume our friendship from where it left off last August. That’s what irks me the most — they want to hit the “play” button after our friendship has been “paused” for over four months. I answer their question the way you answer any vague question, “It was good.” Yeah it was good, it was ‘effin grand. But that’s where the conversation ends and we fast forward to how the Starbucks has moved and how so-and-so broke up over break.
I feel frustrated (and maybe this is just me being selfish) that no one asks me how it really was. Not even my family or closest friends. They don’t ask me what it’s like to pick up and move to Europe for the first time; they don’t ask me how it feels to travel to a new country almost every other weekend; they don’t ask me how I’m adjusting being back. The few who are more curious about my adventures will ask me more simple questions like “How was the food?” or “How were the Irish guys?” They were well traveled and drank a lot of black tea, by the way.
I don’t blame them for not knowing what to ask. I don’t have many friends who travel, especially as I did. My older siblings who had traveled to Europe before me had traveled with teammates, stayed in hotels, and had to adhere to a strict schedule. My travels were unplanned, unorganized and pure adventure. When I arrived in Rome, for example, I arrived with about fifty euros cash and a girl I barely knew from Irish class. I asked her casually the weekend before, “Hey, wanna go to Italy for study week?” I arrived with this stranger to our hostel in Naples in the middle of the night. The trains around Italy are cheaper at night, naturally. We were too broke to take a cab and unfamiliar with the metro, so we walked 30 minutes from the train to our hostel which was not in the city centre as we thought. I was lost all the time, I was suspicious of everyone, I was alive.
This isn’t about me reminiscing about my very bold and very exciting life in Europe. This isn’t about the guys I dated abroad and the Guinness I drank during the day. This is about me transitioning back to life here. I no longer fit in the stencil I designed for myself here in Philly. My shape has changed and the cutouts don’t seem to bend.
I’ve kept myself happy in the past by staying busy and working towards short term goals. I was happy because I wasn’t thinking. But now, I’m awake. I’m awake with thought and desires, imprinted with culture and I thirst the thrills I’ve experienced again. I can’t go back to hanging my laundry on clothes-lines and saying “Cheers” as a substitute for greetings anymore; but, I will find a way to figure my shit out and re-carve the cutout of who I am now, and who I want to be.
marisa centrowitz 