My tenure in the Fatherland is rapidly drawing to a close.  I’m currently contracted to write a series of columns for the Salisbury Post, but I refuse to give them first crack at anything pithy and interesting I might have to say about this wild, wild German experience.  No offense intended to the hometown publication, but I’m just inconveniently self-serving enough to steal anything worthwhile for my own blog.  C’est la vie.  Or, as the Germans would say it:  *Garbled vowels that my mouth can’t recreate without laughter emanating from all native speakers present.*  In my experience, even though I cannot pronounce the German phrase, I can assure there’s a 60% chance it has something to do with a farm animal.  For whatever reason.

So, how does one sum up approximately six months of a comically short twenty years of existence?  That’s one-fortieth of the time I’ve spent revolving about on this terrestrial ball.  When rendered as a percent, it’s still in the whole number territory (2.5%, for those of you disinclined to do the math).

The Germans have a word that translates awkwardly into English.  Gemütlichkeit.  Yes, it sounds oddly like a sneeze, but I can’t help that.  The meaning, however, is a curious one.  It’s a feeling we can all identify, but one we certainly don’t have one word for.  Apparently, the Germans do, but they also have lederhosen and other things we don’t want.  As usual, I digress.  This “gemütlichkeit” when taken in English terms, boils down to something resembling “the cosy feeling of belonging attached to a warm beer hall on a frosty evening.”  I put quotes around that.  It’s not taken from anywhere.  I just quoted myself because I’m pretentious and self-aggrandizing that way.  Again, digression.

What I’m dancing around is that, for all my snark, griping, grimacing, whining, complaining, frustration, homesickness, hunger, confusion, exhaustion, and seeming displeasure, there will always be a part of myself nostalgic for those moments of gemütlichkeit I’ve experienced here.

Last night, for instance, I attended a small get-together in the garden of a retiring actor.  In my broken German I floundered my way from social interaction to social interaction, steadily leaning into the ebb and flow of the evening.  Underneath the beige umbrellas, the weak flicker of tabletop tea lights painted faces I’ve come to know in the warm glow that I didn’t have an English word to paint them in.  It was this fabled “gemütlichkeit.”  Here I was, still shaking the afterbirth off in this temporary existence of mine, and realizing that I’d been accepted by these people.  Somehow, in spite of my overall prickliness and ongoing cultural disorientation, I’d settled into being a part of these people’s routines.  It was an honor and a privilege I’d completely failed to recognize, in large part due to my innate proclivity to assume the worst of both myself and others.  Yet here I was, drinking beer and laughing at this intimate little affair where no “outsider” would ever think to be.  I had finally arrived; well, I’d arrived at some point before then, but it struck me somewhere between mouthfuls of curious food and laughing at jokes I understood about half the words in.  These people, at the risk of sounding painfully lame, had somehow been transformed by the mere passage of time into friends.

And “these people” is a misnomer on my own behalf.  They’re just “people.”  Just the same way I’m a “person.”

Would it ever be “home”?

No.

As much as anyone may find themselves enamored of anywhere, there’s something singular about rounding the bend back home––a certain satisfying coating in the pit of your stomach when you crest the hill and see something so spiritually familiar as “home” grow into the horizon.

And that’s where I long to be.

In quiet moments I find myself considering the subtle profundity to be found in bowl of chicken stew from home.  I sat in a Starbucks the other day and was discomfited by the odd facsimile of familiarity perpetrated in the name of branding.  I’d never felt less at ease than in this place that was supposed to be transcendental of border and boundary in its design.  Caffeine creature comfort is no tincture to visceral hankering for a life you put on pause to be elsewhere awhile.

So, how does one sum up approximately six months of a comically short twenty years of existence?

You don’t.

For the “pics or it didn’t happen” generation, it’s a difficult struggle: to have something so fleeting and ephemeral as a personal, private experience.  That’s what it is, though.  No matter how deft the writer (I’m not), how stunning the picture (mine aren’t), or how riveting the story (I’m just lucky people don’t doze off reading this thing), there’s always so much missed in the retelling of anything.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Much the same way as the mere passage of time turns “these people” into “friends” it has a way of melting and reforming the reality of a place, a time, a situation into something different.  All the hardline actuality of something drips off and you’re left with that vague, warm feeling it gave you that you were too busy with your heckling and your sarcasm to notice at the time.

I’m pretty sure that’s what any memory is, if you give it long enough.

So, I’m sorry for the anticlimax, but it’s difficult to punctuate something so close to home.  The story this is part of one is I intend to continue for the next sixty-odd years.  In the anticlimax, though, is something I hope is taken away from whoever happens to read this damnable thing:  I can’t tell you what life feels like, you just have to go do it.

Now stop reading this damned thing and go do something.