expatriotism.

exactly three months after my 20th birthday i will be on a very large plane, very far out of this country. i will be studying in the town of nancy, france for four months. i am about as excited and petrified as any one person can be. i am greatly looking forward to exploring a new place. i can't wait to linger in a café and eavesdrop on conversations while holding a warm bowl of café au lait. i can't wait for large family dinners where the food is good, the wine strong, and the conversation so lively that no one topic stays on the table for more than 5 minutes. i can't wait for the prospect of being immersed in a language to the point where english becomes an arduous task to muster up. i can't wait to be overwhelmed by the french lifestyle which treasures beauty, art, food, politics, and conversation over all else. unfortunately along with these wonderful experiences comes the strong possibility that i will encounter impatient shopkeepers who won't even give me the benefit of the doubt to speak to me in french. i'm sure at one point or another under the stress of traveling i will get on the wrong bus/train/metro and have to painstakingly retrace my steps to regain the proper direction. i will have to overcome the awkwardness of transplanting myself not only into a culture rather unfamiliar to myself, but also into the home of complete strangers. i will be on my own thousands and thousands of miles from home. there is the grand possibility of a broken heart of homesickness. that's an interesting concept in and of itself because i'm not sure where to call home. there is my parents' house in the town in which i grew up in. there are parts of that place i miss, more moments that could never be recreated than any particular place or object. i honestly have no desire to return there. then there is nyc, which i probably have the most attachment to for a place as a whole, which is odd seeing that i lived there not even four months. there is my current place of habitation, more a holding tank in my stages of transition where i am more attached to the people i've met here than anything else. i feel as though i've become some hybridized plant species with old roots i inherited that are planted in one place, then the fresh, new, rapid growth and roots i so desperately want to spread located in a very different place. then it's as if all my fruit has been unwillingly, and all too early, plucked from my branches and unevenly distributed across the country without my consent. and soon, all too soon, i will be off to a new, strange place. what a complex mess i've created as a self-diagnosed vagabond.