difficulties and wonderful-ness-es of being abroad

(this is meant to be a sketch---not super-edited! I hope it gives a sense anyway of the two extremes one can feel in another place)

This is weird. I never know how I'm going to feel about France. What I've learned from my experience abroad is about decision making. How you have to follow your gut feeling, but then you have to accept what it brings you, and be willing to let it change. To make your decision and let it unravel if was supposed to.

There are times in France when I feel almost physically unwell at the thought of having to stay here. I feel so far away from what has meaning for me. My room becomes a prison, in the streets the old walls of Paris feel binding, they block the sun, the rituals of cafés and meals and classes where the students speak not becomes unbearable. The shifting of people is unfulfilling, in the city they move together for conversation and inevitably parting to their separate homes or classes or places. Endless wandering through Parisian streets alone, looking in store windows filled with antiques too expensive to every own to pass the time. Then the airplane ticket, the date marked so incredibly far into the summer. It seems it will have half ripened when you arrive, that everything will be moving on without you, and you will be struggling to slip in the current, unsure of who you are, betrayed by your own self who slipped away when you didn't realize it would leave you just a shadow.

But then moments of bright clarity slip in. Though the future seems fuzzy, there is definitely a smell of pleasantness in the air. It is the present presenting itself as 1. moments of approaching new ways of thinking, of living, letting foreign things into your life. Taking down your guard, and tasting different ways that don't at least at first measure up to what you know already, but are all the same tantalizing, and bidding you walk a new path. 2. moments where you feel so connected to your essential self but you let it grow in new ways, it's path no longer limited by old cultural norms and psychological rules. This whole thing lets in new birds, new possibilities of soaring, new material to work with. When you were just running out, it brings you new places. But you start to find who you are, who you bring with you, and after a while you start to let it shine.

Then the streets of Paris become warm, and gritty, and you can wind in and out of the shops and they are like your innocent place, where you have to weave your own colorful thread. Paris doesn't give you this thread, but when you have it to start to let it unravel behind you wherever you go. And all you can do is trust you can form a web that will support you and surprise you with its colors when it is dense enough to form a kind of floor. This floor has potential for great beauty, but you have to trust that it is being created as you walk forward.