nostalgia
May has been a strange month for me so far. I remember last May, when I was applying to CIEE to study abroad, and it all seemed so difficult. I had a nervous breakdown in Hebrew on the phone with my mom on a crowded Seattle public bus, on the way home from an internship. The weekend I finished my CIEE application was the weekend that Jason stayed with me while he was between apartments, the weekend of the Ave Street Fair. It was the day after turning in my application that we took a Bio Structures 301 test (the one on the lungs and cardio system), and Kari and I decided to go downtown to go shopping and see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith to celebrate taking a difficult exam. May was also Folklife and the Matisyahu concert, and the Friday that Jess, Sasha, Robin and I went to services at someone’s house.
Over the course of my application process for the study abroad program in Spain, I’ve been told that I “must be so excited” to spend six months in Spain. Part of me said yes, but most of me said no. I was not excited, I was scared. I was scared that something would go wrong, that I wouldn’t understand a word of Spanish. Mostly I just wanted to be with my friends and family.
However, these past couple of weeks, I have realized that something else has come up, a different kind of worry. Reentering the States. Going back to school after nearly six months in Spain freaks me out a bit. I’ve been dreaming about UW for the past few nights, and all of my dreams have been about seeing my friends again. Friends’ faces haunting me, mostly. I brought up this topic with Kristen while we were having our weekly Tuesday night dinner and simultaneously planning our trip to Berlin. Kristen and I wanted to visit Checkpoint Charlie and a concentration camp while in Berlin, and we brought up Kristen’s description of her visit to Dachau with her family and my description of my conversation with Rabbi Will over his trip to the crumbling Berlin Wall when he was studying abroad in England. This lead into Kristen and I wanting to go home but being afraid of not being able to explain our experiences to others due to an inability to know how to explain things to others. And then… a situation arises, we have good coffee with certain people, we’re on certain bus rides to certain places, certain encounters that open us up to explain what we’ve seen and done, things we can’t explain in normal situations. This is the way it was when I asked Rabbi Will about his experience in Berlin, while we were on a bus in Rio de Janeiro. Certain places with certain people make you open up the way that other situations can’t. This is most likely the way it will be for me when I return to Rochester and to Seattle, the inability to describe, the unconscious waiting for a certain moment to arise. Then I’ll be with someone, someone will ask me a question or say something while we’re having tea, and things will just… change.
Over the course of my application process for the study abroad program in Spain, I’ve been told that I “must be so excited” to spend six months in Spain. Part of me said yes, but most of me said no. I was not excited, I was scared. I was scared that something would go wrong, that I wouldn’t understand a word of Spanish. Mostly I just wanted to be with my friends and family.
However, these past couple of weeks, I have realized that something else has come up, a different kind of worry. Reentering the States. Going back to school after nearly six months in Spain freaks me out a bit. I’ve been dreaming about UW for the past few nights, and all of my dreams have been about seeing my friends again. Friends’ faces haunting me, mostly. I brought up this topic with Kristen while we were having our weekly Tuesday night dinner and simultaneously planning our trip to Berlin. Kristen and I wanted to visit Checkpoint Charlie and a concentration camp while in Berlin, and we brought up Kristen’s description of her visit to Dachau with her family and my description of my conversation with Rabbi Will over his trip to the crumbling Berlin Wall when he was studying abroad in England. This lead into Kristen and I wanting to go home but being afraid of not being able to explain our experiences to others due to an inability to know how to explain things to others. And then… a situation arises, we have good coffee with certain people, we’re on certain bus rides to certain places, certain encounters that open us up to explain what we’ve seen and done, things we can’t explain in normal situations. This is the way it was when I asked Rabbi Will about his experience in Berlin, while we were on a bus in Rio de Janeiro. Certain places with certain people make you open up the way that other situations can’t. This is most likely the way it will be for me when I return to Rochester and to Seattle, the inability to describe, the unconscious waiting for a certain moment to arise. Then I’ll be with someone, someone will ask me a question or say something while we’re having tea, and things will just… change.