I left my home country because I wanted to see more of the world after staying in my home town for too long. I ended up on the other side of the world to stay here for months and months but realized that everything I have at home is way better than everything else. I have great friends and a great family. I also met a girl I wanted to get to know better right before I left and I now spend a lot of my day just thinking of her. We’re trying to keep connected and I hope we’ll spend a lot of time together once I get home. It scares me that she might find someone else while I’m gone… If you don’t risk anything, you won’t gain anything… Everyone should travel for a longer period of time to learn to appreciate what they have.
When I turned 21, I went to the bar and met a cute 24 year old German guy. We flirted and agreed to meet for dinner after he was done with work a few days later. He showed up at the restaurant for our date looking dashing and brandishing a Kroger bag. He said he had a surprise for me, but I had to wait for dinner.
Inside, he started the conversation: “For work, I do internet research, so I look you up…” he had written down the times for races I had run, when and where; poetry that others with my name had written; high school info, sports articles, and “your records.” I thought he’d hacked into the school system to find my grades, but really he had found my online journal from my studies in France, where I mostly wrote stories of crashing my bike into different bushes and trees. He felt it was important enough to take notes and read them back to me.
I then pretended for another half hour that he wasn’t totally creepy and made some small talk over mediocre pizza. He felt we should go dutch, so I split the bill, and then he revealed his grand Kroger-bag surprise: eight packets of photos.
“I went to Thailand last year; I’ve also been to South Dakota. What do you want to see first?” We had discussed neither, nor travel. I chose Thailand.
Somehow he managed to grope my breast and thigh before the night was over. I’m still not sure how that happened.
That was the last I ever saw of him, although I did get a hopeful email invite the next day.
The first thing I did when I came to the U.S. was cry.
I wasn’t very young or prone to crying, but the weight of being away from my native Israel was too much.
The second thing I did was eat shrimp. You could NEVER get those in Jerusalem.
I just moved to Ann Arbor last week. I have lived in Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Whenever people ask me where “home” is I never know how to answer. The idea of going “home,” or being “home” is completely foreign to me. People always say they can’t wait to go home. I love moving place to place so much and meeting new people. I never want to go home. I only want to keep moving.
What happened to me in Switzerland:
17 years old: I went overseas for the first time with 50 bucks and no idea what I was doing. I fell in love with a boy with whom I could not communicate verbally and taught myself his languages.
I taught myself the unwritten language of Swiss German (which, contrary to popular belief, is an entire language of its own and not a dialect). My love became an alcoholic. He abused me. I was scared to leave, scared I couldn’t survive in Europe without him.
This was after we were married.
I quit art school to go marry him… our relationship lasted five years through the Iraq war, from a week before it was declared until it should’ve been long since over, but unfortunately the war lasted longer than our love and is still thriving. Our sad relationship is jealous of the Iraqi war and its comparative longevity.
I left as a 22 year old self-taught trilingual. I opened my own gallery and lived on painting sales until I got out of Switzerland. They tried to deport me. They sent me a letter saying I should leave the country and my old love came to the petition rally to sign the petition that got my deportation repealed. I abandoned the gallery and moved back here to Michigan this February when my 35 year old brother had a heart attack and two seizures. He is waiting for a kidney, pancreas, and heart transplant and lives now only hooked up to tubes.
I spend my days and evening holding the fibers of my family together.
I deserted my marriage and my life and I feel like a failure.
I never finished college and I don’t know where I am going, but I am trying so hard.
Im sitting in my university’s computer lab and I cant help but wonder what it would be like to be sitting anywhere else but here. What would it be like at this exact moment in Thailand or in Brussels? I could be walking down thousand year old streets and rediscovering things that the modern world has forgotten. But instead I am destined to learn about all these things in a classroom. I’d much prefer to live them.
I worked at a detention home in NY, trying to make the world a better place. In less than 2 years i knew i would never make a difference. I packed up, left NY and went to school in FL to work with zoo animals. Since i graduated, i got engaged, broke a heart, obtained more debt then I’d like to think about, met my best friend and introduced more people to animals and their hardship in the wild, then can be counted.
I finally feel like I may be making a difference.
Now my best friend moved away, and I’m not sure i want to do this any more.