this may be a tough one to write

So I got home last night from watching Arrested Development with Toby and Joel (and don't worry, Rachel, we'll watch it in the spring, too), and I realized that in *sigh* (a complicated sigh) less than three days, I have to leave. Ok, that's misleading: I realized that all of the thinking I'd been doing while walking around, going to and from places had been about how soon I'm leaving, or, more accurately, about everything except directly addressing this... it's like a weight hanging over my head, like a huge exam for which I'm unprepared, only afterwards things won't be good-done, they'll just be... done.

Anyway, I'm writing an introduction because I'm introducing the two hours I sat at my computer last night (which didn't really feel like two hours), writing and trying to get those thoughts out, onto an electronic substitute for paper. I'll spare you the bulk of that writing, but I do want to try to express something difficult/complicated, and I'd hate to waste what I did instead of sleeping yesterday, so here goes:

Going home ridiculously soon, I guess it’s only natural to feel a little, well, off, because of the rather substantial change that takes me from a mathematics exam in Budapest on Tuesday morning to home-cooked dinner on Thursday night (thanks, mom!). This, though, feels more significant than normal change-of-situation anxiety. It, in fact, doesn’t feel like anxiety at all; it’s more of a let-down feeling.

My best guess is that it is over, the, frankly, crazy year that started with declaring major(s) and took me to Washington and then Europe, which when I think about it sounds pretty impressive in retrospect (not to toot my own horn) but I feel like it happened to... someone else, like I can't look out and see the forest that is My Life and Things That Happened to Me for all the trees like "Shit, I need to buy some more Kleenex."

Here's the problem, though: the more I want to try to verbalize what it is, exactly, that I feel, the more trite it sounds. I get to wondering about how must I ‘really’ feel, because I can’t possibly have such un-profound (in the sense of cliché or “conventional wisdom”) thoughts about what’s happening to me, I mean, aren’t I special? Am I or am I not doing something extraordinary? when this is the best I can come up with.

I guess it all boils down to this idea that the whole seven months of running around the eastern seaboard and then the continent of Europe is… finished, done, something to look back on instead of forward to.

Part of the problem is that I’m not sure I’m ready—I’m still finding new places and things and people (even new people in my program), and it will all be... undone by my going home. That that going-home feeling, in which everything is fundamentally the same, and which before has been so welcome and a respite from college and whatever else, has… backlash, I guess, side effects, maybe, of not being able to show everyone how different you feel and how different you are—they all just say that somehow, it looks like you’ve grown taller, even if you are twenty and according to the pencil marks on the wall you basically stopped growing a couple years ago.

In any event, I feel like I’ve gotten the chance to do a lot of growing of late, and I’m just not sure how I could possibly communicate that eloquently (which may be why I’m posting this on the internet so everyone can just read it, which may in fact be the bluntest way I can imagine to get something across).

Ty always held to her opinion that my studying abroad was a vacation. I had, until, say, last night, believed her to be incorrect, but something changed my mind. No matter how much bitching I do about math, I have to admit that there’s a strong element of “vacation” to living in BP. I realized this walking to Toby and Joel’s for dinner: snow was falling, and I passed a sidestreet down which there was a gorgeous Catholic church, which for all its glory has to have some kind of architecture word to describe it, just sort of set back in the neighborhood (and dirty, which makes it seem more authentic because everything here is dirty) with a lit-up tree out front; on my left, the street ended at the Danube, with some distant lights from the Buda side making a faint glow through the snow and low clouds. It was, simply, gorgeous. But more so because it was so… commonplace; it’s not the Basilica of St. Stephen or anything, just a neighborhood parish on a little street, near buildings with Kinai Gyorsbufek, Szolariak, Gyogyszertarak. That something so… foreign, different, remarkable could just be and feel ordinary amazes me. I really liked that about it, that I managed to get really comfortable here, that BP has felt like home after visiting other places, so much so that even hearing everyone speaking Hungarian to each other waiting in line for the planes at Moscow and Amsterdam made me really happy and excited (and led to me conversing, badly, with strangers in Hungarian)...

I guess this doesn’t fit well with “vacation,” does it? Maybe it just means that things are more complicated than vacation/not a vacation, or maybe it means I can’t organize my thoughts coherently. In either case, there’s a lot of beauty here, and I’m going to miss it (I have a feeling months will pass when everything will make me want to talk about BP and everyone will get sick of it, and something makes me think won’t it be funny if I end up doing this particularly, inadvertently, to Sophia, just because I think we always end up talking most when I’m caught up in something). But a vacation, because of the difference, and the beauty, and the sense that there's really no comparison to this semester among all the things I've ever done before.

I’m also, frankly, not so keen on going back to PO in the spring. I know that Rachel and Steph and I have talked about getting out more, living LA, exploring, etc, but it’s not enough for me for some reason right now to get really excited about. Generally, though, I’m most afraid that all of the new and variegated experiences I’ve had in the last seven months (the miles, the people, the food, the schedule) will somehow not at all change the way I will be at Pomona—in a sense, I will have managed to regress to a me from before these things. Possibly, what I’m afraid of is that, after this amazing series of trips, I’ll get back and be the same, that this reverse metamorphoses or regression is nothing to be worried about because the progression didn't happen in the first place. I don't want to be overly bleak or dramatic about it; it's just hard to know how, and if, you yourself have changed. Logicians have demonstrated that I cannot prove my own sanity/existance/uniqueness, and I'm starting to think that this is true in a more-than-trivial/mathematical sense.
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Back to things written this afternoon:
On a tangent, I'm really looking forward to using the kitchen back home. Toby taught me how to make galuska last night, and I think I'm going to practice some actually techniques, instead of "throw everything into a skillet with a little oil and some spices" or "throw it on the grill and brush with a little oil and some spices." Exciting times to be in Denver, I'm sure, if we're friends and you like eating.