two worlds
Dear friend,
I’ve started and scrapped this letter so many times now. I’ve been away from this writing space and sometimes it’s hard to get back into the swing of it. It is mid-June and somehow it still doesn’t quite feel like summer. The days have been largely cold and rainy, the kids only just out of school.
The seasons feel like they’re running behind this year in the Jiu Valley. When I left for the States at the beginning of May, it felt as if spring was just finally starting to really establish itself here. The mountaintops were still boasting deep snow but the forest behind Dallas was full of stinging nettle and the dandelions were bursting out hardy and yellow. The day before leaving for my trip I spent a few hours at the stove boiling the flower-infused water together with several kilos of sugar to make dandelion honey.
I spent nearly three weeks in New Mexico with my parents, and it was a time of rest that I really needed, even though I had been home for Christmas. Usually I don’t return so often to the States but I found an exceptional deal on a flight, and I was able to be home for my cousin’s wedding (and thus see lots of family members I haven’t seen in years), my dad’s birthday, and Mother’s Day. So often I miss being with family for these celebrations, and it was special to be able to be there for so many in a row. I got in some good hikes, some painting, some climbing, some delicious food that I can’t get where I live (Japanese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese), and of course some sweet time with my family and a few friends.
New Mexico feels like a different world. It is a different world, for all intents and purposes. The climate, the people, the landscape, the culture, the language, the general feelings of how the world works, the specific feelings of who I am in it…it is a strange thing to straddle these two settings of my life. As I travel between these two homes, I’m beginning to realize that jet lag is no longer just the difficulty of adjusting to a new time, but to a new space as well. Your body and your mind (and also, I suppose, your heart) hold onto the little unconscious realities of the place from which you’ve come, and in that transition period, realities from two worlds collide and coexist—but only invisibly, and only in you.
Now that I think about it, maybe that’s a good way to describe the feeling of having two homes: a space/time jet lag that you never fully get over. Sometimes it is more intense, sometimes you can barely tell it’s there, but it’s ultimately your way of being in this world: inhabiting two places in different half-ways, finding yourself both here and there, but nowhere fully.
Of course, there is some sadness/loneliness that comes with this. There are also advantages—it feels like a privilege to have two places to belong, to be able to move back and forth, to be able to have a place to go if I need to take a step back from my normal life. To be honest, I enjoyed a bit of time away from my regular life and routine while I was in the States. I do love my life here in Romania and I can’t complain of anything, and yet sometimes things get heavy without me realizing. I feel so fortunate to be able to take little “retreats” where I’m able to take a few breaths and just generally fill the cups that have been depleted.
When I arrived back in the valley, I couldn’t get over the length of the grasses, the length of the days. The rains had pulled so much green from the ground, and there was still light in the sky at 10 pm. The dandelions have evaporated into soft wishes, the stinging nettle grown tall and hardy and no longer good for eating, but now we are seeing lilacs, and elderflowers, and the beginnings of yarrow, and the fragile pine tips coming in lime green against the dark of what they will become. Life moves forward, and I adjust accordingly, grateful for it all.
With love,
Xenia