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. 

. . .

I cried when my dad hung Christmas ornaments on our ceiling-high artificial tree. Sitting on our wooden living room floor, I delicately rifled through organized boxes of ceramic Disney princesses and a photo ornament of me as a shepherd in a church preschool play. I became so accustomed to sharing new traditions with Uruguayans that the familiar ones now feel foreign. I imagined my friends gathering around the tree. Naty, Sofie, Juan, Mono, and Josefina would open worn ornament boxes and laugh at my baby pictures. Flor would use the step ladder to reach the tallest branches. Other friends would hover on the couch, laughing and passing mate in a circle. Afterward, we would dunk green and pink spritz cookies in milk and trade stories about Christmas traditions. I shivered in the absence of their warm presence. 

“There is a before, and there is an after,” Ryan wisely advised me on one merienda phone call. I recognize the cutting truth in her words. Nothing is the same as it was before. Now, the stories and lessons from Uruguay are etched into my mind’s synapses. My brain is different. My heart has changed. This is the bumpy road of after.  

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Seeing Wicked in theaters!

I saw Wicked six days after arriving home. I cried, unsurprisingly, at the wistful story of two good friends learning to see eye to eye. The Ozdust ballroom dance sequence, however, plucked at my metaphorical heartstrings. When Elphaba begins dancing in the circle of Shiz students, she dances as herself. She is strange, whipping her arms around her head and throwing her cloak in a free but calculated style. Yet her dancing reveals her strength. And her beauty. She refuses to conform to a society that is intimated by anything different. The students’ whispers and chastising laughter fuel her static movements until suddenly they overwhelm her. As a tear rolls down her downcast cheeks, Galinda steps out of the crowd. She lights up the floor in a fluorescent sunset-hued floral dress. Everyone in the ballroom and theater holds their breath. Galinda, meeting Elphaba’s gaze, gracefully begins to dance, stepping her feet out to Elphaba’s rhythm. Galinda repeats Elphaba’s strange sequence with grace and steady hands. Then, she pushes her hands out to Elphaba’s, and together, they dance as mirrors to one another. 

I was both Elphaba and Galinda when building international friendships. I was both the strange one and the one who followed the lead of my Uruguayan friends. I was the strange one when I asked my friends to take off their shoes before entering my apartment. I stood out for being tall, blonde, and foreign. When I arrived, I moved to a different, legato rhythm; my movements were smooth and uninterrupted. Would anyone accept me or see the strength and beauty in my boisterous laugh, relentless curiosity, and type-A personality? 

Uruguayans not only accepted me, but they celebrated me as an individual, not a stereotype. They cared for me during carpool karaoke to Bruno Mars and spent evenings eating pizza while gushing over The Goblet of Fire. They listened and, together, we danced around kitchen tables and club lights. 

Every day I stepped out of the crowd and watched my Uruguayan friends dance in brimming awe. They dance to a slower rhythm than I do. And they sway together, unhurried, as families, as friends, as a country. They are proud of their slowness. Tranqui. Their tedious, protective method of preparing mate is a dance in itself. Sitting on the beach with a soft breeze, everything slows down – their breathing, their subtle movements as they pour boiling water into the gourd. At asados, I raised my hands to theirs and together, we danced on patios and under parrilleros. 

Our opposing rhythms enhanced the other. They are harmonious and balanced. As they listened intently, the styles of the others became secondary. We became better dancers, better friends, and better people by meeting each other halfway. Now, as we each move forward on the bumpy road of life after, we will continue dancing through life -- together.

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White Christmas at Chanhassen Dinner Theaters

One of my favorite Christmas songs is from the 1954 movie, White Christmas. It is a lullaby with a wise lesson: “When you’re worried and you can’t sleep, just count your blessings instead of sheep. And you’ll fall asleep counting your blessings.” 

Coming home for the holidays comes with its own baggage of worries. But my blessings are plentiful. They live in every friend, mentor, student, and person whose life has touched mine. Together, the individual invisible strings create a web —a fierce international family fused by love and curiosity. So when I am worried and I can’t sleep, I count my blessings. Because every time I close my eyes, I see their smiling faces, and suddenly, nothing else matters. I am home again.

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