The bumpy road of after

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Disclaimer
This blog, this post, and all related accounts are not an official Department of State publication, and the views and information presented are the Grantee’s and do not represent the Fulbright Program, ECA, the Post, Fulbright Commission, or the host country’s government or institutions.

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There is a painfully unique loneliness I felt when moving back home after leaving another. No one else can ever understand what and who I left behind and what and who I was missing when I was gone. The only people who come close to understanding my mourning for my past life and longing for our home in Minnesota are my cousins who moved to Florida and California. Standing outside a neighborhood coffee shop, snow dusting the parking lot, we filled our lungs with the First Kiss apple crisp winter air. It cleansed them momentarily of the exhausting humidity of coastal summers and suffocating LA traffic. 

The cold in the North is just, well, different. It is dry. It nips, tickles, and sometimes bites, refusing to let you go. It is playful when teasing the first snow of the season. Sometimes it plays rough with the wind that slaps my already rosy cheeks and crystallizes my soaking wet hair after a hot shower. You have to feel it and breathe it to know it. Usually, I take refuge from it. But on soft days, it coaxes me out with bright sunshine and sparkling frost on spruce tips and my car windshield, which I reluctantly scrape off with the double-ended brush every Minnesotan stores in their trunk. On those days, it is a sanctuary that invites me to breathe deep and lose myself walking in circles around a frozen lake. I come home in the crisp cold.

Being home feels, well, weird. I told my friends that my body is here, in Minnesota, but my mind is in Uruguay. In my mind, it is only a matter of time until I return to walk the Rambla at sunset, share a meal with Flor and Andrés, and sing Bruno Mars carpool karaoke in Mono’s car. And that holds some truth. But the whole truth is that those reencuentros will happen in a matter of months or years, rather than days or weeks. 

Time’s passing is marked in my parents’ new blue and green lined dinner plates, friends’ engagements and job announcements, and shiny apartment complexes sprouting on freeway exits. They finally opened a sporting goods store in the former Herberger’s lot that remained empty for years. I scrolled through the 300 options of bridesmaid dresses for my best friend’s June wedding. Things that have remained the same my whole life suddenly changed overnight. 

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