1 week equals 7 days...

As I sit here in the Paris Beauvais airport (en route to Krakow and Warsaw – first time in Poland!), I can’t really believe how quick this year has gone.  I finished my last exam this morning and in exactly one week, I will be flying high above the Atlantic ocean on my way back to the US.  Perhaps that isn’t the strange part.  The strange part is that I’m not coming back here – when I get on the plane, that’s it, just packing up my life here and moving back to the US.  It almost seems like a joke – every time my host mom brings it up, I laugh it off, saying “Annie, t’inquietes pas, je vais revenir!” 

I think I’m in denial.  It feels like next Tuesday is no different from today, just a trip and then I’ll be back home.

And there it is, the key phrase : back home.

Earlier this semester, I wrote a post about feeling a bit lost, as if I was afloat in the sea with no real roots.  It felt like I had no home, because nothing felt permanent, not San Diego, not Middlebury and not Paris.  But somehow in the last few months, that’s changed.  Home kind of snuck up on me, and suddenly I find myself struggling to come to terms with the fact that this is, in fact, not permanent.

The truth is, I can’t actually imagine what it’s going to be like to get on that plane – checking my bags, walking through security, the voice of the desk attendant calling out the departure, sitting and watching out the window as the tarmac of the Charles de Gaulle airport fades into the clouds…

I can already imagine the moment it will truly hit me because the same thing struck me when I was in New York for a few days earlier this spring ; whether it be on the plane when the flight attendants switch from announcing in French to announcing in English, or when I step off the plane in San Francisco, it will be the fact that everyone is speaking English.  American English.

First thought?  Ugh, freaking tourists, just pipe down.

Except they won’t be tourists. 

And I’ll just be another American, getting off a plane from Par-ee, that place with the Eye-fill tower and the Ark duh Tri-umph.  Signs in English will glare at me, with big bold letters greeting me to the land of the free, the land of the brave. 

The customs agent will welcome me “home”. 

And there it is again, home.

I suppose as someone who hopes to move and travel quite frequently, this revelation, that home is such a difficult term to define, is timely.  Will the US always be home purely because I am an American citizen?  Or could a place like Paris be home?  Can one have multiple homes?  Or will that just lead to a perpetual cycle of wishing one was elsewhere?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to being back in Solana Beach with my family; but I know that I will so many things about the life that I have created here : jumping on the bus, grabbing a glass of wine at the nearest bar with a friend, Annie’s incredible cooking, and discussing French politics with Annie’s friends.

Because the truth is, Paris, you have become home, and leaving you will not be easy.