trip notes: 9 June

2:00 PM (american time): Sitting on my unmade bed, home bed, uploading trip pics to Facebook.

I had absolutely no time to write in Paris-- we were literally always going, running 6-11 on very little sleep. But it was marvelous! We did all the touristy stuff, saw the Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Coeur, Notre Dame; boated the Seine, ate dinner on the Eiffel Tower, had street-vendor Crepes. We saw Amboise, a chateu on the Loire, and spoke all the time in French-- marveilleuse! Again, the humility balloons at me, but it is a very good and satisfying humility.

I liked France a lot, but I could never live in Paris. It's very much less clean and calm and meticulous than Munich. There are people, people, people-- all the time magnificent terrifying ravenous herds of people; people like sheep and snakes and ants crawling their tracks through the city. But i loved little Amboise; real France is quaint and refreshing and lovely. Paris, however, was still very neat.

Now I can say what I've learned. (For one cannot expect to spend a week in Europe and come back the same person.) It was very stretching-- a foreign country, one and a half foreign languages, 18 other mostly-foreign students with whom to spend nine entire days-- very overwhelming. But it is good to be occasionally overwhelmed.

This is what I have learned about family, and myself: I did not fully recognize the negative mud my family drowns in until immersing myself in my trip-mates general positivity. I mean, sometimes we all got grumpy, but the overall tone was different. And I bloomed. I was not fighting. That was it-- I was not fighting for anything; I was allowed to be the exact person that I happened to be, and to thrive. I was allowed to be joyful, even when there was not particular occasion for joy. Life can be like that. This what I learned. Even not-in-Europe, life can be like that. People don't always want you only because by draining you they can somehow enhance their three square feet of existance. It can be better. Men can be better. Someday, away from here, I can be allowed to grow.

But with this comes the sickening realization that I am homeless. Emotional hobo, I am. I am so jealous of those who can return to their families and be the exact same person they always are; whose homes allow them to thrive. Who do not have to always be fighting not to suffocate in the deafening negativity. But this is the sand with which I am surrounded, and so I must carve myself likewise. It is good to be sunshine, but sunshine gets lonely hanging out in all that darkness. But a hope has been pricked open and the organs spread out: when I am grown it can be different. I can bloom open, can thrive; can refuse to suffer the slow suffocation, the overabundance of a self that is not mine. I have discovered with my great tap-root (or perhaps it is that which I've discovered-- or found to be missing) that there are good men; and that they, and I, are worthy to be loved.