Komunikace

I just made my first friend in here Atlanta – and it only took me 6 months.

Life in the big city as a young single has hit me hard upside the head following the easy college lifestyle and two years of overseas exploration, and I have few outlets to express the culture shock I’ve managed to hide beneath a naïve obsession with blending into American culture again.

So the table has turned, and now even words in my native tongue are inefficient to express the feelings lurking behind two years of inner change being attacked by values and habits just recently purged. Somehow I feel homesick, though I’m supposedly at home.

In a conversation with a relative, we discussed his various travels to far off destinations, some of which I had never even heard of – he had been to every corner of the globe and learned to appreciate the smaller places and its people the same way I had.

“But, you wanna know something funny,” he cooed as he slid distinguishably back into his chair, with an air that demanded a cigar or a glass of brandy twirling in his left hand, “I was always so relieved to come back to the USA. I don’t think I’ll ever leave it again now that I’m this old – we live in the best country in the world.”

Everyone nodded accordingly, but I just stared down at my thin coffee disagreeingly, too timid to voice my opinion.

I love my country and every memory, friend and family member that I have here, but the continent that I called home for a few short years haunts my life back in the USA in a subtle way that won’t let me simply return to life as normal. It could be that I’m simply holding on to the past, to memories of a carefree and whimsical European existence that I hesitated to leave for a steady job in the States, close to loved ones. But mostly it’s the inability to voice my longing for what I left behind and to verbalize exactly how my time in the Czech Republic changed me as a person that drives my loneliness.

The transition back to the States has itself been overwhelming – moving from a former Communist country just teetering on the twenty-first century and still fascinated by everything natural - where they enjoyed life and appreciated the small pleasures it brought, not its endless consumables. I taught children that appreciated having a native English speaker help them learn the language and mentored others who simply needed someone to talk to – in any language. I felt that what I did mattered, and everything in my life was fascinating and new. I woke up every day invigorated about what I would learn in the next 24 hours and what challenges I would face, or what undisturbed village I would visit next. I was growing.

Atlanta, on the other hand, is a large, metropolitan American city where corporate yuppies my age the flock to materialistic urban condominiums in trendy areas to spend too much money on the same things they could get at Wal-Mart and wait for hours to have drinks at the hippest pick-up spots. Something tells me that this is what I should want for myself – but I feel surrounded by wastefulness and discomfort when I succumb to the pressure. While I recognize that my perception of life back in the States is likely skewed and biased, I still feel separated.

I’m different, but I’m the same. I’m the same, but I’m somehow different. Not even I can accurately earmark the changes, though I know they’re there. There are feelings inside of me that I can’t communicate because of the boundaries that different times and different experiences have created. We are all very caught up in our own lives, and taking time to truly decipher the meaning of spoken words is a luxury we have long forgotten.

So, because spoken words have failed me again, I’m turning to writing once more as an attempt to surface whatever I’ve been keeping quiet. I’m going to recount what I’ve learned about myself over the past 4 years of my life - and I’m going to do it in a most peculiar way.