We turned at a dozen paces and looked up at each other for the last time.
I've been spending a lot of time lately reading back on the entries I've made here over the course of the last three years. Direct confrontation with everything that I've experienced in this time is simply dumbfounding. When I came to Holland I was 18 years old, spoke one language, had heaps of aspiration but no clear goals or ideas about what I wanted to do with my life.
Fast forward to the present.
I am 23, speak (semi-if-not-sometimes-slightyly retarded)fluent Dutch, have vastly improved my Spanish and am becoming quite coherent in German. I've lived and studied in Barcelona and London, am certified to teach English as a foreign language, am in my second year of university and will be leaving in January to spend half a year in Granada. My life is consumed with trying to balance schoolwork, projects, socializing, and scouring the internet for interesting masters programs in Europe. Next year I'll be doing an internship abroad for a semester before coming home to defend my thesis and graduate. After that, the world is my oyster. I want to study International Relations and specialize in Human Rights and Conflict Resolution. I'm giving serious consideration to naturalizing and obtaining a Dutch passport, which I'll already be able to do by next November. I want to spend a year traveling alone through South America, documenting my experiences and encounters there in journal entries and photographs- maybe even someday making a book of them. Publishing optional.
These past two years, especially, have been an extremely difficult time. I've learned so much, so quickly, about what constitutes real friendship, real love, real sacrifice, and about swallowing my pride in an attempt to be the bigger person, the one who doesn't necessarily have the last laugh but, certainly, that comes out better in the long run. I've nurtured relationships, attachments, entire lives around myself, then left them all to start again from nothing. Always in a new place, always by myself, but never as the same person I was before arriving. I have learned a thousand times over how different I am than those around me, how much my cultural background and upbringing have shaped me in a way that ensures that total assimilation will never be an option, but in the same breath, have come to relish the fact that this means I will carry a tiny piece of home with me forever. In the bigger picture, loss, betrayal, sadness, and feelings of displacement are simply milestones to be reached, acknowledged, and then surpassed. And while understanding these things never seems to make them easier to experience, I have yet to fall victim to true and lasting regret for anything which I have done.
This journal has been my solace in so many of my moments of despair and eurphoria alike. But in the way that a slight change in mood and the first glimpses of sunlight tell you that the night is over and it is time to go home, so I have begun to realize that it is time to move on from here. As the author of my own life, I have the choice to write a new page everyday and so complete the story that I will one day reflect on with, what I hope will be, great satisfaction. The people who care to will know how to find me. And to those who don't: I hope that you have enjoyed reading.
Here's to a new chapter. As Jack Kerouac once wrote, What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.