Thoughts, Prayers, and Feelings

When I woke up from my dream in the Czech Republic, suddenly I was back in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan where I was wildly disappointed. I’m not sure what I thought would move on, maybe the people, maybe the city, the tipping culture, the houses, the businesses, the technology, but nothing did. It feels like everything had waited for me before continuing on its regular motion. But inside me, something did happen. I’d been elsewhere, lived a different life, and when I woke back up, that life didn’t come with me. It’s difficult to understand a year isn’t a long time. It’s long enough to change a person but not long enough to change a place.

When I came back “home,” if you can even call it that, my friends in Michigan told me their year was different without me. There was one less seat at the lunch table, one less person to talk to, and they were excited to have me back. They thought things would go back to “normal”. But what’s normal for them isn’t normal for me anymore. My “back to normal” doesn’t exist. Suddenly, I’m here again. I know I had these experiences, they’re in my head, they’re in the pictures on my phone, but I can’t feel them. When you go to a country smaller than your own state, you don’t find everyday reminders of it here. No news articles, no movies, no casual references. It makes me feel crazy, like whatever happened in my own last year was just in my head.

My friends talk about last year’s basketball games, the football games, the Taco Bell drama, the beach days. These are the same kinds of stories from the year before, and the year before that. Even though I wasn’t there, through their stories it feels like I was. In Michigan, every day follows this meticulous pattern to a point where I feel involved in a story I definitely wasn’t involved in. Then, when dig up memories from my year abroad, they don’t chime in with “oh yeah, I remember that” or “wait, you forgot to add…” the way they do for each other. Instead, they say, “That sounds like a movie,” “That’s crazy,” or “What a dream.”. And all of a sudden my memories feel like that, like a movie, something crazy, or a dream.  

The only times I can feel my times in the Czech Republic as a real moment are during those small, personal moments. Like when my dad called me “bear” and asked me to give him my “paw,” and suddenly all the embarrassing but fun memories of the Slovak song “Medvídku, dej lapku” came flooding in with vivid imagery. I cry out for moments like that again. I want to walk the downtown of Mt. Pleasant and overwhelmed with the memories I had in our “namesti”. But, the streets in the Czech Republic look so different from the streets here in Michigan, so different from any street in America, and that only adds to the out of the place feeling. How can the Czech Republic be the only country with streets like that? The only country speaking that language? The only country that eats tartar sauce with everything except fish? It feels impossible. It feels unreal. It feels like a story I’ve told myself too much, like a dream I woke up from too soon.

It feels like I’ve woken up from a coma. Everything here is the same as it was last year, the year before that, and so on and so forth. It’s weird to know I lived a life without any person to still stand next to me to reassure others and myself that it was real. I know I lived another life. I know I walked the streets of Prague, laughed with my friends in Bratislava, and connected with my Czech friends even if I didn’t always know what they were saying. That was all real, not just a dream locked in my head. I have to work with myself to reorientate, to take a breath and know that two things can be true. It’s true the life I had back there was real, just as true as it is that I’ve returned to the life I have now. One life doesn’t cancel out the reality of the other. I know I will be back in ČB to relive those memories the best I can, but until then, I’ll live in Mount Pleasant. I’ll finish my last year of high school. I’ll drive through the same streets I’ve always known with the hope that when I leave again, when I find a new country, new friends, and a new life, Mount Pleasant will start to feel like a dream too.