Starting to Say Goodbye

Funny how you can get nostalgic about a place before you've even left. With less than three weeks before I fly home, I've already entered into that territory. In no time I'll have graduated and I'll be looking for a fulfilling, challenging and inspiring job (if anyone has any leads, by all means let me know!). I'll have adapted back to the rhythm and flux of Austin, to daily life with my boyfriend, to breakfast tacos and Barton Springs and delicious potlucks with my friends, to driving a car again. And my time here will start to feel like something that happened in a sepia-tinted dream.

Soon I'll be that girl. The one who instead of saying, "This one time at band camp..." will be saying, "This one time in Porto Alegre..." to anyone who will listen. Of course, I've still got a lot between me and my 6 PM flight on May 18. A LOT. Some of which I should be attending to this very moment instead of writing a blog entry. But hey, this is how I always operate, putting off the important stuff. I'm in this time period that my mother described as, "...such a whirlwind and a wanting to stay longer, yet feeling the rich fullness of the time." It's this moment where I want to grab onto everything and make it last, but where I'm also ready for home.

I've been talking to some of the coordinators of the youth groups I've been working with, saying that I hope, hope, hope to find a job working with adolescents back in Texas (fingers crossed!). And then if that's the case, oh the possibilities. With a glint in our eyes we imagine embarking on projects of cross cultural exchange where the kids here can learn about the kids there and vice versa...like wouldn't it be so cool for kids to share pictures with each other about their lives, lived 5,000 miles away from each other?

The connections I've made won't be cut just because I leave the country...it's just the nostalgia I have for the little moments, all the walking around this city, all the waiting at bus stops, all the cafezinhos, daily greetings with doormen, finally knowing exactly where the coconut juice is located in the supermarket, always feeling pressured by the huge clock in front of the hospital, that time a little old lady asked me to help her across the street, how soft the skin of her hand felt against mine. It's a nostalgia for a place and time that can't be revisited because each time I return (and I do want to come back) will be a different experience. The deep colors of the graffiti that I took pictures of will have faded. Likely there will be new graffiti in its place.

And so it goes. 
[Thank you Kurt Vonnegut for that oft-repeated phrase in Slaughterhouse Five which struck me as profound when I first read it at age 13 and has stuck with me ever since].

Musings on Being Foreign

Journal Entry from a month in Tamil Nadu
Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl

My father, an American living in France, sent me a link to an article in The Economist, titled "The others." (Thanks, Pop!) Essentially it continues upon the theme I began in my last post on what it is like to live in a place that is not our original home:

The author writes:

"...however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner... Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasizes over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia - a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it." (p. 87)

This fuller version of nostalgia (though I'm not sure about the angry part...is anger really the root emotion?) reminds me of the Portuguese word for it: saudade. The word means so much more than just missing something and is translated in my Harper Collins dictionary as "longing, yearning and nostalgia."

Re-watching Garden State last night, I was reminded that in some ways, the foreigner's experience of saudade can tie to the experience of leaving one's childhood home for the first time. As the main character says:

"You'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. "

Once you do leave what you've always known you can't truly go back again because it won't be the same and you won't be the same. I don't know that it's a bad thing. In Austin, I miss New England. In New England, I miss Austin. But it doesn't mean that I'm unhappy. It's more like a Beth Orton song, a wistful, bittersweet melancholy that's also beautiful because it's just life.

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Reference:


(2009, December 19). The others. The Economist, 85-87.