A Long Time Gone

I've been away too long, and in three days, I'll leave again.

In this case, I'm not talking about America. While it is true that I've been away from my childhood home for over two and a half years, I've been away from my second home, London, much longer. I left this city over four years ago, after studying abroad and working here for the summer. It was a special time for me: my first time living and working abroad, thousands of miles from the place I'd grown up, the people I knew, and the person I was. I loved London, and, at the time, I could imagine myself spending quite a long time here.

But four years later, and how things change. It's part of growing up, I guess, but no one ever tells you how difficult it can be to go back to a place. Now that I've lived and worked in Niger, completely on my own in a completely foreign place, can I really still call London my second home? After all, I only spent about six months across the pond, whereas I spent two years in Tanka Lokoto, my Nigerien home. Does London get priority because it was my "first" second home? Or does Niger win out because it's so much closer to my heart and so much more immediate in my thoughts? When does the idea of place and home dissolve? After your third, fourth, fifth home? I'm closer to Niger than I am to my original home in America at this point and seriously terrified to return to a place I feel will have changed in all the subtle ways places change when you're away for so long.

I've been in London for about three weeks now. Everything is the same, and everything is different. London, as a city, seems to have changed very little. In all my time here, I've taken more evening walks through darkened streets than I can remember. It's a very walkable city, and the cool air always helps to clear my mind and work out any number of things I may or may not be pondering. One would think that in such a dynamic city, that I'd be lost after four years away, but as much as things change, I find the streets are still there for long walks with confused thoughts.

Most of these thoughts have reflected change. When I was here four years ago, none of my friends were married, most were still students, we all had too much time on our hands and not enough money in our pockets. But that's changed. Several of my friends, after four years, have serious relationships, one's gotten married (though I still haven't met Becky, and I'm not quite sure if it's all just an elaborate hoax). There aren't many students left (except for one who went for a PhD and got it, only to realize that that wasn't the kind of doctor she wanted to be. She'll start med school in September), and those who were students with no money but all the time in the world are now working, have money, but don't have the time to properly spend it. The ironies of adult life astound me.

And this "adult life" is what really gets me. It's assaulted me since I've come back to London and seen the first big group of people from my past life. I went away four years ago and they were all like me. I come back, and I'm still like me but everyone else has moved on with new responsibilities, a career, a relationship, a life. And here I am, broke, unemployed, without a girlfriend or any responsibilities, and I'm looking to go back to graduate school. Another two years of student life. Many might paint me as trying to avoid all pretenses of adulthood for another two years, but I am quickly approaching 26 and those appearances are actually just a clever deception, at least that's what I hope. Suddenly it becomes easier to understand the long walks through quiet city streets.

If I have to be honest, it's hard not to feel a bit lost, psychologically speaking, after so long away. It's too true that life goes on without you, and despite all my egotistical cravings, there's no changing that. People have to live their own lives, with hundreds of others coming and going throughout the years. Old friends reminisce of years gone by, and a fleeting image appears before the next round of beers. I've realized that the further I've gone away, the harder it is to come back, and as the years go by, in this age of globalization and worldwide opportunity, the farther and farther my friends drift to different corners of the globe, and the more I move around, the harder it is to find my way back to them. Already, it's been nine months since I've seen any of my fellow Volunteers from Niger. The people I meet along the road are all temporary souls who move where they wish, and eventhough I can identify and instantly cling to these vagabonds, pour out everything that needs to be said, I know that the relationship will end, and I'll have a pin in the map representing someone else that I may or may never see again.

It's spoken of a lot in literature regarding cultural readjustment, but I've found that these vagabonds, the ones who take in couchsurfers or who band together for a few days at a time in small traveling groups are more inherently interested in who I am, what I've been doing than those who stay put. Most of that is due to time constraints. We travel together, spend hours with one another, cook meals together, live intimately in such short bursts that we never leave the honeymoon phase of burgeoning friendship. My friends here, as amazing as they are (and I do love every one of them), don't have the time or the opportunity to get into where we've been, what we've been doing over a beer or a meal. I don't find I have the time either. Where do you start? Four years away, and who knows where we'll be next time we meet? Everyone honestly tries, and the greatest thing about my friends is that I can usually just pick right up where we left off. You have to, because four years of life compacted into about two hours just can't do justice to all that either has experienced. It also means that I end up feeling as if I haven't done anything, or nothing significant anyway, and overcoming that feeling may be one of the markers of growing older.

Because if there's one thing I've come to realize over such a long trip, it's the importance of independence, of self-actualization of all you may or may not have done. I have to take advantage of the places I'm in, attempt to have an experience with each new moment, mine my fellow vagabonds for every ounce of the beauty that is in every person who counts themselves truly alive, and generally live without any regrets as to opportunities lost, words unsaid, or moments unrealized. Living like this, one creates moments to which only a few people are privileged. They're stories that are within you that you can't properly convey because true beauty, a unique moment, is the hardest thing to convey, and even in my best moments, I still feel like I'm falling short, even if I've left the other person spellbound. They are moments that stand with me, and even if no one can fully understand how unique an experience it may have been, I'll know that I've felt something special, and I have to be thankful that I can relive it in memory, even if I can never share it fully. For my friends here, and I'm sure for my friends back in the States, there's a lot that they cannot know about what I've done, and even with weeks and weeks of constant story-telling, I'd still not be able to create my world for them. And it's the same for their lives as well. I by no means think that staying in one place, connecting with one person, working on a career is any more or less significant than any of the things that I have done. So even these moments of quotidian life, the ones I've missed out on, can't be expressed any better than some of the magical experiences I've had. And that's the story of four years away. Where do you start? Can you start? And if you can, is it possible to ever finish? I don't think so. Our stories are how we define our lives, and our perceptions of ourselves change with each year gone by. It's why I believe, after my three weeks here, that if I were to move back to London, say for graduate school or just for fun, I know the city will be the same city I left, but I will not be the same person. And eventhough the city is so familiar, I will be experiencing it all over again as if for the first time. I'll be meeting people I know but who I really will be rediscovering all over again. I'll remember my past, and be content to remake my present in whatever way the current of time takes me.