One month left.

Yep, folks. You read that right. Thirty more days and I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic. And hopefully not disappearing in an electrical storm before I get to breathe the sweet polluted American air. (Too soon? Sorry.)

Someone asked me today if I'm excited to go home. Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Yes x 10^29380291.

But then I look up at the insanely blue sky and down at the collected letters of Hunter Thompson in my lap, and I think, when will I ever have the time to appreciate these things again?



I wonder if this sensation of comfort in burgeoning familiarity, of nine-thirty sunsets over the city from the bike bridge and the (nasty, nasty) taste of warm wine in a blazing late afternoon outside Piecken, will end up coloring how I felt about this whole experience.

At the risk of beating that dead horse a couple more times, it's worth re-stating that my first couple of weeks here pushed me into depths of misery that I didn't think possible for a normal human being to bear. Sometimes I'm re-stocking on groceries at Albert Heijn and I'm struck dumb lifting a bag of muesli into my basket just thinking about how far I've come. Was it really only five months ago that I retreated into the dark space between the bread shelves and the employee door, reduced to embarrassing (loud, snotty, mascara-drenched) American tears because I couldn't tell the difference between fabric softener and bleach and regular detergent?

I think the magnitude of this whole experience just hit me now. Daaamn. I am a different person.

I won't be that girl who returns from abroad tanned and beaming and full of stories and just ACHING about how much she misses where she was and her brand-new [insert nationality here] boyfriend. Not to diminish the awesomeness of that experience. I would have given my right arm and maybe a couple fingers from my left hand to have a relatively painless, joyous, perpetually Facebook-friendly time abroad.

But the things I've done--and the things those things have done to me (yeah, just try to straighten that one out)--have showed me who I am at my core. Ecstatic ups, horrendous downs, and now I think I'm starting to get a general idea of who I'm going to become. And it's not too bad.

Bring it on, June.