Lost in transit

Lost; In Transit.

As the poet said, What happens to a dream deferred? A dream by definition is not reality, and yet most would say that our only true goal in life is — should be — to make them so. A dream is our attempt to construct the future; reality exists only in the present, and our past is built of memory. So what happens when you defer the future? Most, if not all, of the writers on this site had, at one point, a dream, a future to be realized: a when that we could imagine only in conjunction with a where — an elsewhere.

So, to recast the question: what happens to an expat repatriated?

I can’t speak for all, but this one in particular sagged under a heavy load, indeed. I still cannot quite wrap my head around the notion that it’s been more than one full year since I returned from living abroad, probably because if I try it’s simply too depressing. Especially when I consider why.

It’s the oldest story in the book, of course. To recap: girl moves to Europe, girl meets foreign boy, girl spends over a year preparing to move to boy’s country, girl loses boy. An entire revolution around the sun spent living (again) in the one place I had wanted most to leave; working a job I hated; two (!) long-haul overseas trips taken to bridge the tyranny of distance for a few weeks; countless phone calls and emails and photos; grad schools applied to for the purpose of retraining and relocating; all towards the future of moving to Australia and start a new life with the boy I loved. And now he’s met someone else.

As another poet said: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

When I joined this site, Mig mentioned that sometimes its writers just disappeared. Well, he was right, I did disappear: not in the physical sense, but the figurative. Returning to New York dried me up, rather like a raisin in the…well, you know. How could I write about being an expat when I was, for the present, so miserably, so unwillingly, a repat? All my life, I dreamed of living in Europe: London, Paris, any city big enough to need only a first name. After three decades I finally made it happen in Prague, and it lasted all of six months before I put it aside for another dream. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

When I got the phone call two weeks ago (the nausea-inducing one that always starts with “we have to talk”), I have to admit it wasn’t my finest hour. I yelled. I cried. I panicked. Why? Mainly: I was trapped. I’d closed one door behind me to prop open the one ahead; now that one was swinging shut. I’d only come back to move away again, and if I couldn’t do that, that left me…still here. Not there. A future of being stuck between destinations, a lifetime of hallways. The dream, permanently deferred. Would I explode?

Three days later, I received the news I’d been hoping to hear — an offer from my first-choice school in Melbourne. I guess it’s nice to be wanted by someone, even if you have to give them a credit card number. So now I had school, the visa application, the money saved up — everything I needed, except him. For the first few days, I was miserable. Without him, how could I move there? But then I realized, given that the alternative meant staying: how could I not?

Australia’s lovely, although not Europe and a hell of a lot further away than I’d intended to go. Moving there by myself (especially to my ex’s city) wouldn’t have been my first choice, but futures can only be constructed from the present. If my choice is between the old where and an elsewhere, it’s an easy one for me to make.

The dream, a bit shorter, a bit older — even limping a little — is back on. I’m done sitting around, biding my time, waiting for the future to arrive. I’ve festered here like a sore long enough.

Now I run.

Posted by wildsoda at May 11, 2005 01:15 PM