Home.

Well, here's the thing: I'm home. But then again, I'm not at home. I'm not even within 1,500 miles of home. Instead, I am in California, soaking up the sun everyday, with nothing that has a relationship to home except for the return of the English language into my life.


In Washington DC, I was torn away from my three days with my CBYX group by my mom, my sister Tori, and her boyfriend (Dustin). Upon seeing them, I was initially slightly annoyed that they had taken me away early from the groups of exchange students, cutting all of my goodbyes short. I looked at my mom in the front seat of the rental car they had picked up in Tennessee. She smiled at me. The biggest smile stretched across her face! "Hi, honey!" Nothing about this felt strange or weird: she was my mom, and she was in the front seat, picking me up just like she had always done before. I had been gone for a year, and I never felt like I had left...


I traveled with my family upon my arrival and experienced America again: full blast. Driving through Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, and St. Louis with my family in the car, the same family that I hadn't seen in a year, got to be an overload at point, but it showed exactly how little had changed. Then I was at the New York City train station and telling my family what to do and reading the train plans. We were in Montreal, and I was trying to remember the few French phrases I knew from my day in Paris and random words from my friends. I sat in the front seat and glanced through the pages of the book that Louisa had handed me in the train station the morning I left, and I thought about my friends and life back in Germany. I might have felt like I never left at times, but then I felt an aching for the place that had also become my "own." 


I started to miss speaking German, the language that had tied my tongue and given me so much grief. I missed my friends and family there that had I had come to love after 10 months. I saw strangers in America and immediately started to form the "Sie" respective form in my head, so I could make a joke about their were no towels left, then I quickly remembered that English was probably their first language too. I woke up after dreaming in German and about my friends and family there, and my first words in the morning were in German. After not speaking for five minutes in the car, I would sit contemplative and not realize until I spoke again that I had been thinking in German.


I've been home over a month now, but I'm still not even home. I am studying Non-Euclidean Geometry at a summer program at Stanford in California. I was home for four days and squeezed in quick "hellos" to some and my brother's entire wedding, before grabbing my suitcases again and boarding yet another plane. The wedding was beautiful. The Texas weather was too warm. My friends and family haven't changed much; however, I feel like I have.