transit

I don't know if anyone is still reading, but I do promise one last post from home before this is over. Until then, I wrote these two snippets on the 23rd and 25th of April - the day we left Kasteel Well and the day we left Europe, respectively, and I thought they'd be a good addition to this. 

Written in the Munster-Osnabruck International Airport in Germany on April 23rd.
Leaving the castle was probably one of the most surreal experiences of my entire life. The water in the moat this morning was green-brown, sparkling with the reflection of the castle and the sun, moving slowly, slowly, still. The sun was bright bright bright on all of our faces and backs, heat steaming up our shirts and making the tulips down by the moat glow red. It made it all the harder to leave.

“I wish this place wasn’t so beautiful,” Allie said. “I wish it was a shithole so it would be easy to leave.”

I backed down the stairs, moving from our newly-minted picture all the way down to spring 1986 – you watch time pass backwards, know that in a scant few hours, you will leave this place, possibly forever, never ever to return.

I said goodbye to everything – goodbye dining hall, goodbye terrible coffee, goodbye hagelslag on every table. Goodbye main castle, goodbye Sophie’s, goodbye warm red couches. Goodbye moat, goodbye bridge, goodbye my room where I spent many nights warm and cozy. Goodbye computer room and laundry room. Goodbye barn, bridge, moat, swans, Bakkerij, All Under One Roof, Spar-formerly-known-as-Meermarkt. Goodbye Vink, bus stop, dunes, Well. Goodbye, Netherlands.

I am slightly less sad only because I am taking so much away from the castle. I am taking knowledge – of how to travel, how to be independent, of who I am and how I want to live. I am taking experiences – of ten countries, eighteen big cities, countless trains and planes and buses, of nights spent in the rain in a foreign country, of cross-lingual communication, of places mundane and magical. I am taking friendships - friends by necessity becoming friends I can no longer do without, friends who have seen the things and places that I have seen, friends who have lived the same unreal life I have lived for the past three months.

Written in the London Gatwick Airport on April 25th:
I’m sitting in London Gatwick airport, seventy-three other students – and Karen Lindsey – bustling around me. We’ve already lost five people and all of the other teachers. Yesterday, we spent the day in London, knowing in our minds and hearts that this experience was almost entirely over. I wish I could fully articulate the feeling I felt in my head last night at a loud, raucous London club, music blaring and strobe lights crackling. It was the same feeling I felt at the farewell dinner – one of fondness and sadness, one of delight in all these people.

Knowing that I am going to see my friends later is wonderful. It’s just this oddness, this strange and melancholy feeling of the end – not impending, not looming, not almost here but NOW, right NOW, I am leaving Europe in less than an hour and it’s hard to accept.

There’s so much waiting for me, though, and I think I’m excited to get back to real life. The castle is such an illusion, a falsification of life in Europe, and real life with work and family and Boston is waiting. Boston, with it’s modernity and the common and Anna’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Lyric Stage Company and the Hancock Tower and everything else that I grew up with and that I know like the back of my hand, that I grew up knowing and learning. Knowing where I am going and how to navigate and being able to communicate without a hitch is going to be both disorienting and comforting.

I so look forward to the familiarity, but do not look forward to missing the unknown.

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Please stay tuned. :)

leaving

I'm sitting here in my room, papers scattered around my chair, art study guide blinking away in Word, preparing myself for the next two days in which I take finals. I am sitting here, six days away from the end of the most exhilarating, thrilling and unreal experience of my life. Six days before I left for the castle, I was at work, fretting inside over the thought of three and a half months away from home, three and a half months of travel, three and a half months of change. It seemed like such a long time.

And now it's almost over.

The thing is, so much has happened this semester - I've stormed Western Europe, made some wonderful friends, and learned more than I ever thought I possibly could have. But it feels like there's still so much left to do, so many experiences unlived, so much magic and beauty left to see. And I have to board a plane out of this castle, out of this country, in four days. It doesn't seem right, somehow, doesn't seem fair that anyone should ever have to leave this place. It is such a bubble, such an isolated community of some seventy eight people who grow close and clash and laugh and cry and spend too much time together that it starts to feel like there's no one in the world but the castle kids. It feels like we've fallen off the face of the planet together, and now we have to scatter and go back to the familiar and the friendly and the mundane.

It's not that I don't look forward to Boston, don't look forward to my family and friends and sweet summer - but it's the magic of the castle, the intoxicating sweetness of a different country every weekend, of new experience upon new experience, of friends and memories and shining eyes and bright smiles and the unreality of calling this fortress of brick and stone my home. It's the sharing of this experience with such wonderful people, many of whom I'd never have known if the castle hadn't forced us together and bonded us forever with the memory of this place.

Time here is different than time at home - you can't really hold it, and the end can hover away from you for so long. You can delay the reality of going home by going on trip after trip, spending every weekend until your last traveling and going out and living life the way you do every weekend, and all of a sudden, it's here, it's less than a week away.

They say the castle changes you - it's so cliche to say that you come home a different person, but I guess they're right. It's not anything tangible, anything explainable - it's this role I've been filling, this new person I've been growing into, the things I've been learning, the way you've just got to do all of this on your own. The more relaxed, easygoing nature of Europe. I can't say I'm not still me - I'm still neurotic and insane - but I can say that I'm not the same me who left the States three months ago. And that's good. You hear enough about the readjustment woes of former castle kids that it makes you worry about the way the new you will mesh, the way the castle kid in you can live away from the castle - it seems such an impossibility, because you've fallen so hard for this place, for this life. I know it'll be fine - I know there's so much waiting for me at home - but I don't think I'm ready to leave all of this behind.

It's the knowing that this will never happen again, I think, that does it for us the most. We can come back to Europe, travel all we want, but this experience is so unique, such a blessing, that letting it end is hard. 

But a former castle kid gave me this nugget of wisdom the other night, and I've embraced it.

"You wouldn't want to stay there forever anyways," she said. "The transience is part of the beauty."

This semester at the castle was such an epic story, but lest we forget, it's not the whole book - just another chapter in life's sprawling novel. And damn, was it a good one.

I'm going outside. The air is cool and damp and refreshing and you can smell summer on the breeze.

Stay tuned.

:)