Прощай, Москва, прощай!
It’s a strange feeling – having to leave a place and not being sure when you’ll return. I guess I’ve had to do it a lot in my life, but for some reason it’s never had so much an impact on me as right now.
Study abroad has a very unique time element to it. It’s definite and short; you know exactly when you’re going to leave, and that date is almost always on the horizon (even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like that). If you hate it, this can be a good thing – you can count down the days, think “Only 44 more until I can eat peanut butter again,” and get by on these thoughts. If you love it, this can be a bad thing – you always know when you’re going to have to go back home, and there’s very little chance of extending it any longer. But when you’re somewhere in between, it gives you yet another reason to feel pulled between your home country and your new one.
A few weeks ago, I decided to make the trip home for break. I have about 2 weeks between the time I end here in Russia and the time I start in France. I was planning for a while to take a train adventure across Europe, stopping in various cities to explore, and therefore the decision to go home was a very hard one. In the end, though, it’s probably the right one, for my own mental sanity. This semester has been a very trying one – not bad, but trying – and I need some real time to relax and recharge before I go to France. I was worried that otherwise, it would affect my experience in France and all of next semester I would just be waiting until the time that I got to go home.
So now, with about a week left until I leave Moscow, I’m having mixed feelings of overwhelming excitement and sadness. I want to go home; I need to go home. There are people who I can’t explain how badly I want to see. And there is, of course, a feeling of comfort that I’m pretty sure I’ve been itching for since about mid-September. However, all I can think about is the fact that I don’t know when I’ll be back in Moscow. This life, the good and the bad of it, has been my life for the past 4 months. Everyday, I’ve gotten on the metro at Филёвский Парк, changed at Киевская, and gotten off at Новослободская and walked to the university. Almost every afternoon, I’ve walked into CafeMax near school to go online and keep up with all of you. I’ve practically memorized the metro map, and I know where the good cafés are and where to go when you need to buy pencils, shampoo, or a phone card to the states. After I leave, I have no idea when the next time is that I’ll eat in a Му-Му, or glance at scarves in the переход or say to someone “I’ll meet you on the platform at the Лубянка station”. It’s the stupid things that you get used to – the things you see everyday that don’t really matter, but are just there, surrounding you, and therefore become your life. And it’s these things that have snuck up on me recently, when I’ve realized that in about a week, I won’t be seeing them anymore. It’s the same thing with the people on the Middlebury program. We had a group of 8 amazing kids, and for the past 4 months we’ve essentially only had each other to rely on, and soon, we’re all going to be gone to our respective schools, or countries, living the lives we left behind when we started this one.
Sometimes I almost find myself wishing I were coming back to Moscow after the break. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s pretty much nothing that can stop me from going to France and living out the life I’ve been dreaming about basically since sixth grade. However, it’s always scary to start in a new place, no matter how badly you want to go, and Moscow is no longer new. There’s a (dare I say it?) comfort in this city because I have been living and surviving here for the past 4 months. There are plenty of things I’m not going to miss about Russia, but there’s a lot more I am going to miss than I had for a while thought I would.
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