Now that the initial excitement of being in my site wore off, I’m finding myself cycling through the same emotions I did while adjusting to life in Panamá Oeste during PST, and it’s hard as hell. It’s unbelievably difficult to revisit all of the negativity I worked through only 6-7 weeks ago, and to battle the same nagging thoughts that I should just go home.
I don’t know how it happened again, honestly. I felt really great and then all of the sudden I snapped, and realized I was right back where I started: feeling incompetent, constantly confused, with no friends, living in a stranger’s home…and this time without WiFi to call home or a bottle of cheap wine to soothe my nerves (always grateful to Mabel for her ability to turn a blind eye, or pour herself a glass and join in at these times).
The emotional shock I’ve now gone through twice in 3 months is exhausting, and I can’t help but reflect on all of the times I’ve felt this way in my life: when I left home to go to college, when I moved off campus to live downtown, when I went to South Africa to study abroad…I’ve done this many times; it’s no wonder I’m fed up being met with it again, this time with a new resistance to the readjustment entirely. I don’t want to adjust this time. I want to be stubborn and aggressive and stay exactly who I am this time, because I’m tired of the on-again-off-again game I have to play with my personality, my beliefs, and my personal comfort.
I know I’ll be fine in a few weeks time, and I’ll read this and maybe even chuckle because I was being dramatic; but in the meantime I’m irritable, moody, and quite the recluse. I hate the way I act when I get like this, but I feel if I just embrace it and feel it, it might pass more quickly and I can move on. I can’t help but wonder when my resilience to these episodes from frequent transitioning will wear down; I don’t want to find out what that looks like, honestly. Hopefully this will be the last one for a while, and I can wait to have another meltdown when I actually do come back home and have to figure out how to be American again.
This week I found myself crying over my high school boyfriend while I listened to “Sarah Minor” by Keaton Henson, brooding over all of my current relationships while listening to “Chloe” by Little Brother, and ultimately bawling into a cup of ginger tea while listening to Death Cab for Cutie when I was home alone because I missed hot showers, the Grand River, pole, and the way Spring feels in Michigan. I also found myself furiously trekking up and down the slope my community exists on to let off steam when I physically couldn’t speak another word of Spanish or when someone explained something to me I already knew, again (it’s like man-splaining, but I call it Pana-splaining here) (I swear if one more person tells me what corn looks like I will lose my mind).
I grew extremely irritated with the rain every day, and how it comes in huge heavy sheets, so loud you can’t think let alone speak. It traps you in the house, and even though you have ample reading material and a hard drive full of movies and every season of The Office and Parks and Rec, you can’t get your brain to stop hearing rain. And you’re reading words written by Walt Whitman but all your brain says is “rain rain rain rain rain” until you feel like you’re going to burst, like an over-full water balloon.
I learned that I hate homesickness. I used to think it was okay, because thinking of home and the things I love about it usually make me smile…not the case this time around. I asked my host sister how to say homesick in Spanish, and when I described it she shot back the word for “melancholy,” and then I got mad that it wasn’t the word I needed to describe how I feel.
Then I got mad because I realized I could never describe how I feel to her or anyone else here, because no one here knows the intense satisfaction of sitting on the floor of the kitchen in your apartment with your roommate at midnight and laughing so hard you aren’t making sounds, and you keep saying you’re going to bed but you keep talking and laughing and your abdomen hurts from laughing so hard, and you need to take a shower and get ready for work tomorrow but the time is just too precious to put an end to with sleep and packing lunch, so you stay up another hour swapping stories about your bizarre coworkers while eating peanut butter or curry or whatever it is that’s sitting on the stove, leftover from whoever made dinner last.
And they won’t get it when you tell them about walking across the Fulton Street bridge in March after you get out of your capstone class, and watching the Blue Bridge light up like a rainbow; the freezing air biting at you through your long johns and jeans and knit hat and the gloves you bought because they said they were proofed up to -30 degrees but you know at that moment that’s total bullshit. But you stare at the water moving massive sheets of ice slowly downstream, and you stare at the bridge with all of its lights, and you stare at downtown as you walk toward the parking structure where your car is, and you feel a weird sense of pride and fulfillment because this is where you live and you know it better than the back of your hand.
And how in the world could you describe sitting on a sand dune and smelling Lake Michigan at the end of summer. In late September, when the air cools down but the lake is still warm, and the sand feels soft as ever after warming in the sun all day, like a big blanket to bury your legs in, because you wore shorts even though you knew it would only be 50 degrees when the sun set because you want to savor the last of the warmth before fall forces you into jeans and boots (even though you love jeans and boots). And you get so excited when the sun tucks itself behind the lake because the sky is suddenly painted with every color you could imagine, and then some you can’t, and when the darkness comes you’re mesmerized with the constellations and the fact that the sky has fire in it and you can still smell the lake and feel the sand, and your heart swells because nothing could ever be so perfect as the cotton of your hoodie feeling so soft and the friendly rush of waves creeping into your ears from hundreds of yards away.
How do you possibly describe watching pine trees sway above you in the Manistee National Forest, making you feel small and fragile while you lay on the ground beneath them in their needles, smelling their freshness? Or standing in line outside the Scheme waiting for a show you bought tickets for three months ago, and staring down Commerce with some crazy anticipation even though you’ve seen this particular band four times already? Taking your favorite booth at Brick Road Pizza and ordering without the menu, because you know the entire thing by heart and the wait-staff doesn’t bother bringing you one anymore? Slinging up your hammock between the two massive White Pines in the SE corner of Lincoln Park, the two that are perfectly spaced for your double, and digging into a good book or a new album while your busy neighborhood moves around you?
There are little pieces of home that came with me here; like my hammock, my favorite books, perfectly crafted playlists for yoga and cooking paella, lots of photos and letters, a coaster from Mitten Brewing Company (remembering that I have that just sent the craziest longing into my taste buds), my Detroit baseball cap. I have a lot of Michigan here, and sometimes the reminders suck and sometimes they’re the only thing saving me from a royally awful evening of tears.
And what can I do to cope? Go for walks. Read. Do yoga. Cook. Make a cup of tea. Listen to a favorite album. Shoot a roll of film. Write. Write. Write. The amount of writing I have done in the last week is mind-blowing. Journaling, poems, listing, letters…I write for hours every day. And right now I’m not writing clearly, and my sentences are running on and running together, because that’s kind of what’s happening in my mind this week as I wrap my head around living here for the next 2 years, in the mountains of Chiriquí, so so far away from home and love and friends and confidence. And those things will come in time, here, too, but I’m scared to wait for them. I’m scared to discover how much time I need to feel them. And then I’m scared to walk away from them when I go home.
I’m scared of a lot of things here; the flying cockroaches and massive spiders don’t even make the list. The next few weeks are dedicated to getting over it all and learning to appreciate this place and this experience for what it is. Because I’m about to spend two long years here, two years of my twenties, two years that I could be spending doing a lot of other really cool things. But this is the cool thing I chose to do for two years, so I’m going to figure out how to do it, no matter how painful the process is. And let me tell you, it’s damn painful.
Deep breaths.
Hanamá
After-Rain
May 7, 2018
It is during-rain.
During-rain is gray and brown water
finding mysterious entrances to your home.
The time you went spelunking in Texas
and feared the stalagmites
and stalactites in the cavernous earth.
A time of silence, but
the pounding on a metal roof
the splashing on cement
the puddles.
The line: “Rain falls
angry on the tin roof
as we lie awake in my bed”
from Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be”
takes on a whole new meaning.
After-rain comes.
After-rain is soft and humid
like a damp towel from rising bread.
Swaddles you in orange and pink sheets
while the clouds lazily part
and water floats in the air like diamonds.
The warmth feels fuzzy, like if
you put an orange peel under a microscope
or slept inside a peach
or camped inside a cantaloupe.
The line: “You need to
paint with all
the colors of the wind”
from Disney’s Pocahontas
takes on a whole new meaning.