A year abroad in 1600 words or less

I’ve always been a runner.

Not in the actual foot-on-pavement way (who has time for that crap?), but in the sense that I always need to be moving.  Whenever I get bored with a place, or if life takes an unexpected turn, or even just if I’ve been in the same place for too long, I run. I pack my hilariously meager amount of belongings into my trusty green Subaru and move to the next city, the next state, the next country.  And I never even look in the rearview mirror, because I’m too excited to see the things and places waiting for me in the future to bother with what I’m leaving behind.

At this point I’ve lived in eight states, in three countries and on three continents, in so many cities I would be hard-pressed to remember all their names.  The first question most people ask in Europe when you first meet is “Where are you from?” (not “What do you do?” like in America), and even that I find difficult to answer.  I default to Michigan, which is where I was born and where my family lives, but that hasn’t been my home in about six years.  In a certain sense I’m homeless, but it’s never bothered me before because I so love the vagabond lifestyle.

And then I moved to Freiburg.

Leaving Freiburg felt so much different than leaving anywhere else.  This time I can’t take my eyes off that damn rearview mirror, to the extent that I’m a little afraid that I’ll crash.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I still can’t exactly put my finger on what it is about that place that makes it feel like home.  It could be the peacefulness there, the practical upshot of being surrounded by forest in a city dominated by bicycle traffic rather than cars.  The only noises carried in through the open windows are rustling leaves, far-off laughter and the slow chime of church bells announcing the time.  Or maybe it’s the linkativity; a forty-minute train ride on perfectly engineered rails or a $30 plane ride and I’m in a different country, ensconced in new flavors and languages and mentalities.

But the most accurate answer – the one I keep coming back to – is the people.  Freiburg is a conglomeration of thousands of international students, most of whom arrived here just as I did, alone and homeless and actively (desperately?) looking to make friends.  People of every age are always outside here; they come out in droves on the weekends, hiking in their Sunday church clothes, sunbathing (occasionally nude) in the parks, visiting the daily open-air markets to stock up on fresh vegetables for supper.

And then, of course, we come to my people.  The people who more or less shaped my entire year in Freiburg, the people who like me had come from all corners of the world.  I don’t think I could have guessed that a chance September meeting at an unfamiliar bar with a bunch of Internet strangers would wind up determining most of my weekend plans for the next year.  Nor could I have known that my choice to swap out one winter class because I wanted to gallivant around in the frozen Bavarian wilderness for a week would end up finally bonding me to my classmates, who would then then determine the other half of my weekend plans.  It’s curious how seemingly insignificant decisions can change the path of your entire life.  What would have happened if I hadn’t gone to the bar that night, or if I’d stayed in my original class? Who would have clinked glasses with me in the Schlossberg beer garden, burned wieners with me at Seepark barbecues, looked utterly ridiculous climbing the walls with me at the bouldering park?  It’s a question as intriguing as it is unsettling:  who would I be now if I hadn’t made those tiny decisions that led me to these people?

Regardless of the hows or whys or what ifs, the strength of the network I’d formed became fully apparent during my last weeks in Freiburg, after my apartment lease ran out and I was faced with three weeks of potential legit homelessness.  This had happened to me once before, in September, and my solution then had been to store the lion’s share of my belongings with a friend and just travel Germany for a few days.  But this time, every person who I told about my plight either offered to let me stay with them or knew someone who could help.  I ended up splitting my time between a bright airy loft next to a babbling stream and an old dorm room in my favorite Freiburg park, living purely (and freely) off the generosity of my friends.  Then when disaster struck during an ill-fated skinny dipping excursion (some ridiculous bastard either moved or stole our things, including my pants, glasses and keys), everyone sprang into superhero mode again.  One friend tried to help us find our things, another wrapped my pantsless self in a blanket, and three of them walked me to another vacant nearby room where I could sleep, gave me dry clothing, and left me a baguette for breakfast in the morning. I don’t know if this is just how Freiburg is, or if it’s just that I was lucky enough to meet some of the best people in the city, but somehow I managed to weave together an international family of my own choosing.

Eventually the year ended, the spell broke, and obligation drove me to board a plane back to the motherland.  Now I sit again in this same house I left a year ago, the place where I come to pause in between adventures just long enough to catch my breath before boomeranging off to the next corner of the world.  I’ve never been gone from America for so long, and cultural quirks I never batted an eye at before are now glaringly obvious.  Everyone’s teeth are so white and strangers keep talking to me about nothing and all of the copper coins are the same denomination.  There are no trams to take me downtown and no chorus of multiple languages crashing into each other in the warm summer air.  But it’s not all bad here.  The dill pickles are fantastically crunchy, the salsa properly spicy.  The bike path (rare for America) sits just off the lake, whose water is so clear you can see rocks sleeping thirty feet below its surface.   Best of all, I don’t have to silently practice German sentences before walking into an office.

But America just doesn’t feel like home anymore, and I’m not sure if it’s just the abrupt comparison between America and Germany, or if I never really felt at home in the US and never knew the reason.  Is that why I used to move so often here, forever feeling that compulsion to run but never knowing why? It’s a hard question, one that will likely fill my thoughts for many of the endless solo hours on my upcoming drive to Edmonton.

Another thing that often fills my thoughts in general is what advice I would tell my younger self, if I could go back in time.  The age of my younger self always varies – sometimes it’s 5-year-old me, sometimes it’s 2-days-ago me, and all of them I tend to think are dumber than my current self.  (The inherent irony of this is not lost on me, and I realize that in a year or fifty I’ll look back on today-me and inevitably think “wow, I was an idiot then.”)  Some of the pieces of wisdom I would tell myself are trite, some are overly nitpicky, and some have the potential to lead me down worse paths than the ones I had actually taken.  But as the end of my European year drew closer, I started writing open letters in my mind to one-year-ago me, that cute little naïve version of myself sitting on this exact same couch in my parents’ house, wondering and worrying about the unknown nature of the next year.

So, 2015-me, here is my advice to you, if you can reach through a wormhole to hear it:  Learn as much German as you can, and don’t worry if you constantly f*** it up as long as you try.  Learn to break ice with strangers without always needing to drink alcohol.  Pursue friendships with everyone who interests you, and then fully open up to and trust these people.  Buy a better bike lock in September (or remember where you parked it; the jury is still out on what really happened with this one).  Guard your heart better, don’t give pieces of it to those who don’t deserve it, and balance its desires with your mind’s logic.  Allow yourself to feel fear, but refuse to let yourself be governed by it.  Don’t rely on other people to determine or define your self-worth.  And lastly, if the German police knock on your door at 2 am, you’re not legally obligated to open it.

This all makes it sound like this past year made me infinitely wiser and that I now know everything about how to live happily in this world, which is monumentally untrue.  I did manage to learn some things (although admittedly very few came from the classroom), but for sake of brevity I won’t list them here.  The important part is, even though I learned so much about myself and humanity and life, the main thing I learned is that I have so much more to learn.

Because – say it with me, Game of Thrones fans – “You know nothing, Jill Terese.”  I’m just doing the best I can.