Home Again, Home Again

IMG_7492.JPG, originally uploaded by melizoic.

There's lots I could say... lot's I'd like to say... entries floating around in my head about re-entry and all that jazz. But currently, I'll leave off with the last, lingering memory... and the future excitement of a Portland visit this September. Andrew showed me his Ireland... now I get the chance to show him Oregon's beauty. And risk falling in love.

That place called limbo...

I am... empty.

Words have been pouring out of my fingertips for the last 24 hours... and yet i feel like, with them, they've taken all of the experiences away. I wrote them all to remember, and instead i sent them all away. To live in curling lines of ink, in long-winded emails, in idealistic escapades no longer in my head.

My gut feels nothing but hunger. just plain, old hunger (it's just about noon...). Not love. Not exhileration. Not excitment.

Limbo.

Strasbourg isn't my home anymore... it, too, is a memory. And even though the setting is still here, the play had its closing night long ago. Any more life I'd want to start here would have to be starting anew...

I am ready to be home again... i need some solid ground, a more-than-temporary life upon which to plant my feet. I need people and love and hugs and a future to look forward to. I need smiles and sleep and connections and conversations.

I need to be home.

Perhaps Ireland's secret is that it steals a bit of your heart and holds it hostage... that's why "every irishman's dream is to return home..." They want that piece of their heart back. They can't feel the same awe and magic and exhileration of life without it. I'm know I have enough heart left to feel plenty upon returning home... but I do feel like, upon exiting ireland, i lost a small part of myself.

who knows. perhaps it's just tucked away in a corner of my luggage and i'll find it upon unpacking the copious amounts of STUFF i should be arriving home with (will be paying a hefty sum to check a third piece of luggage, because there was just no way my 7 months of european life would fit in the two suitcases alone...)

i can't stop writing because it seems to be the only way i can find feeling...

get me home.
I'm ready to leave.

Overwhelmed and Reeling...

my stomach has been trying to sort out what my mind is too overtaken to do these past 24 hours since I left my final day of travelling and arrived back in Strasbourg, jolted to find myself back in a life that seems so familiar but so... finished. And so far from my final three days in Ireland...

If I said I fell in love, my last few days in the land of music and mayhem, I'm not sure I would be telling the truth. I certainly loved... and I discovered that pull, that magnetic drive... I fell in love with the idea of falling in love. With the beauty surrounding me, the power of ancient islands and ocean swells, the cliffs that dare you to walk that fine line between living and falling... with the music, the aires... the instruments... the smiles... and with a surprising Cavan boy living a man's existant under the name of Andrew.

Remember that kiss that didn't go so well my last night in Drumshanbo? The singer that talked of irish history and myths that offered the lift home at the end of a night pub-hopping together? Remember the uncertainty of meeting up again for an Aran islands adventure, when I felt like I didn't even know this guy, but had thought sure, why not...? Remember...?

I remembered. Which is why i nearly texted him on friday (at the prompting of a jealous galway man who wanted me to himself...) to tell him not to come... to tell him my plans had changed... that I was sorry, but not to come... don't come...

But I didn't. And I can't say that it was fate that made me refrain... it may well have been weakness on my part. And childish curiousity. But whatever it was, it was the right decision... to let him come and, over the course of three days, take my by surprise, time and time again, with the amazing human being he turned out to be.

A smiling-eyed, sincere, romantic, previously shy, eight-siblinged, music-imbibed and child-like soul. Who made me want to fall in love.

I could write out everything that happened in the last three days... midnight bike rides on a desolate island in the near-pitch black (if it weren't for millions of stars...)... windy ledges dropping dizzingly towards the sea... normand-made hills atop which we kissed, sheltering each other as the downpour hit, drenching our tangled legs under the watchful gaze of Saint Patrick's statue... family singing session my last night out, at the sprawling old rector's house in County Cavan, as his mother said "who's this beautiful girl you've brought home to us, Andrew?" and made sure I heard each one of her men sing the music they live... and a night of tentative everythings, in his one sister's old bedroom (where he was most certainly not meant to be... irish catholic family rules...)

I've lived a dream. From which I can neither escape, nor truly comprehend as being real. By this morning I was afraid I'd forgotten the sound of his voice... but a text message sent it back to me, soft irish accent and all.

The problem with travelling is you get used to dawning one life's existence for a few days of exploration and then shedding it as you move on to the next stage of the game. You get used to holding on to nothing more than memories... scrolling through pictures to bring them back, but leaving them where they are, in the past, in a moment's time. You get used to making connections, gathering email addresses, and then wondering, absent-mindedly, if you'll really stay in touch.

I am back in Strasbourg, a life long left behind. In two days time, I will be flying into the San Francisco airport to be happily reunited with my life back home, jet-lagged and smiling. And part of me knows I could just turn off the incessant call of the last three days of wonder... file it away in the dream bank and look back on it fondly... move into the next life, waiting for me around the bend, and fully equipt to sweep me into a new and full existance, sans the soulful touch of a beautiful irish boy (though in official years, he belongs more in my brother's generation than my own...)

I could let it all go. Probably more easily than I could hold on.

But he'll be out in Palo Alto in early september for his closest brother's wedding. "And Portland can't be that far away, right?"... the tentative tease of a potential second meeting, of a reconnection...

I don't want to let go...

of the desire to fall in love... of the smiling eyes... of the living dream... the culmination of two and half months of i-learned-so-much travelling... i never expected this. Story-book romance doesn't exist, remember? Except maybe in europe...