Going Back

Traveling really trips you up, and questions the foundations of the place back at ‘home’ you’ve rooted yourself in so deeply that you see everything in its light. Shake it off! Shake it off! I’m glad I threw myself onto this trip, terribly mentally underprepared I must say. The realization wouldn’t – as I knew it wouldn’t, and how could it? – sink in until I felt my insides sink into the pit of my stomach, in that sweet feeling of lifting off from your native soil.

I’m back. This is not a visit, this is not a holiday. This is stepping back into another life of mine. A whole world that I built up from scratch with my own bare hands over a year’s time on the other side of the planet.  Another reality, and a place I invested so much of myself in that it feels like reconnecting to a severed piece of myself. A piece that finally found a home in sunny, life-loving California and told me it would be happier to stay back there, while my other pieces came back with me to my home in chilly, level-headed Holland.

I knew it would be a trip, but I could not have prepared myself for the shock of crossing over to that other world. Stepping from the plane teleportation machine, and off onto the platform of the Amtrak vortex train station, and through the portal, my senses swelled to familiar sounds, scents, and sights. The distinctive hue of the sunlight here, the scaly eucalyptus trees, the nightly cricket choir, the cork oaks and olive trees, the heavy towering stone pines, the blue jays, the spastic rabid squirrels: my heartland’s nature greeting me. And, unexpectedly, my mind flooded with vivid memories helped along by the man-made environment. The wide concrete sidewalks with the painted curbs, the traffic signs, the street names and all the familiar shops and stores. The very first street I walked down, G St, brought back evenings spent with different friends in the various cafes and restaurants: The Beer Shoppe, Woodstocks’, DeVere’s, Wunderbar, Ket Mo Ree, ACE hardware store, I remember I remember I remember it all.

And then it found its way back to me: the surge, that big surge in my chest, that brimming over with ecstasy. It was the occasional spilling over of that baseline happiness and gratitude I felt in my time here. It came over me mostly when I was racing my orange road bike, bless it, or when dancing, or clambering up the soft hairy arms of sequoia trees. Where to go? Where to go with so much happiness? Oh man, how I loved my life here, how I loved who I was here.

I’m walking through a dreamscape. My mind and body still filled with my (make no mistake, equally sweet) life in Holland, and yet here I am, walking through the scenery of a life that a year ago seemed much realer than my Dutch life. The two sides of Inception, and I’m not sure which side I’ll wake up on. It’s a big confrontation, frankly. I've been turned inside out. For a year Davis and its people and places were a virtual reality that existed somewhere inside me. Now, it turns out it's kept on existing as concretely as ever without me, and I stand eye to eye with it, and I am in it, instead of it in me. 

And yet, it’s all changed; the space-time fabric has filled up the hole I left upon departing. Ahh Time, you get me everytime. All the components of my California life are still here, but only remnants of the life itself remain. They’re stored in the hearts and minds of people, as I’m finding out. They greet me with all the old love. They’ve carried my memory in them, in all the stories that we’ve shared. People are the key. The key to time. The constants while the waves of time ceaselessly keep rolling over, rolling over. People bridge the spatial and temporal divide. People, weavers of fabric out all the different times, gingerly sewing meaning into its threads, they’re such magic.

I am one of them, and as crazy and wild as this navigating of different worlds feels at times, I’m doing it. Quantum dancer on the rolling waves, threading them together. Gathering up all the pieces of who I am in their different shrines, and proving they can all exist simultaneously, finding synthesis in one of those magic human specimens, me.

I’m really glad I came back to check up on things here.

 

Bye NL, Hi CA