The other day my dad called me from work to ask how I’d been doing, and I told him that I hadn’t gotten up off the couch all day. And there was this pause on the other end of the phone, and then he said, carefully:
“so get up off the couch. Bundle up, go outside, go for a walk.”
Context: it was like two o’clock in the afternoon. I had slept straight through the previous night, almost woke up close to morning and lay in bed and tossed and turned and drifted for a bit and felt frustrated with myself for not being able to wake up until I finally managed to pull myself up and out of bed
— got dressed, walked downstairs, brushed my teeth, checked my phone, stood in the kitchen and just —-
didn’t want to face the world.
curled up on the living room couch, and went right back to sleep.
That’s where I was when my dad called me.
He stayed on the phone with me as I swung my feet over the side of the couch, stood up, went looking for my socks and shoes, my hat and coat,
a leash for the dog who kept curling up next to the couch and worrying
and my dad was just there and listening to me talking myself through each tiny little intermediate step towards getting outside. At one point, I needed both hands to tie my shoes or something and I needed to hang up. So I promised that I would let him know when I was out the door. It took me longer than I wanted it to, but I did it. I send him this picture:
And he just told me I’d done a good job.
We – Lara and I – walked for maybe a mile and a half or two. And with each step, it got a little easier.
Münster, Germany, is too small to deserve its own labeled dot on many maps. One can walk or bike anywhere in the city.
Like a lot of cities in Germany, Münster began with the construction of a church. As time went by, folks settled down and built their homes in the shadow of that church, and a village was born, and then the merchants came and traded around the edges. Just another stop along the river, by the harbor, before there were train stations and steam engines, back when a boat on the water was nifty shortcut that could change the shape of the world.
The oldest buildings and streets are in the center of the city, in downtown. Even as the city expanded and sprawled outwards, the oldest part of the city remained at the center, like a heart. It’s like looking at the rings of a tree. But it’s not a perfect cross section across time, because Münster, like a lot of places in Europe, did not escape the bombs, and humans had to rebuild in places.
As one does.
I can sit here and I can talk about taking a cross section of time. But since the beginning, there’ve been people taking the long way, moment by moment. For lifetimes.
So the city continues. Every week, there’s still a market in the square by the church. The streets come alive with people. Friends and lovers and children and street folks. Bakers behind the counters of cafés on every corner. On market days, butchers, gardeners. The invisible people who put up the posters on the walls under the bridges. Musicians. People drinking beer on the sidewalks, perusing the displays in the shop windows. People on bicycles, so many bicycles, everywhere you turn…
There’s a bicycle path in the shape of a ring, called the promenade, that loosely defines the edges of downtown. The bike path is lined with warm, globular street-lamps and old trees, and there’s a footpath along one side of it, and playgrounds and parks, and it cuts across streets every few hundred yards.
There is this one place where the promenade slopes down under a bridge. Bicyclists can stop peddling, for a moment, on the otherwise level path, and feel the wind in their faces and watch the bridge whoosh by above their heads before the peddles click back into gear, and begin to push back against gravity.
While I was in Münster, I read Kathrin a wonderful book in which witches swooped across the sky. I doodled them at Kathrin’s table and tried to write about them on napkins in coffee shops. They seemed – almost at home, in a place where the buildings and the culture were so beautiful and old. Almost.
When my fingers got cold holding onto the handlebars of a bike, I wondered if that’s what it would feel like to hold onto a broomstick.
When the sun had set and the mists crept out from behind the trees along the promenade, the air felt thick with magic.
When Alyssa’s hair and Kathrin’s coattails trailed out behind them as the three of us went flying down the hill and under the bridge on our bicycles, it was easy to pretend we were witches.
The earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. Because the orbit is not a circle, the distance between the earth and the sun is not a constant.
Because of the way the earth’s axis is tilted, the amount of time that any point on the earth’s surface spends facing the sun depends on two things: 0. Latitude 0. The earth’s location in its orbit
The the length of daylight in the northern hemisphere is actually shortest when the earth is closest to the sun.
I have a vivid memory of a high school science teacher turning off all the lights and climbing up on top of a desk with a flashlight and a globe to demonstrate this phenomenon.
It’s almost the darkest day of the year.
“I like this one.”
“Eehhhh. It’s crooked near the bottom.”
“What about that one?”
“Isn’t it a bit tall? Plus, the needles are too sharp.”
“Look at that one over there!”
“Pffft. It’d never fit in the house.”
“THIS ONE!”
“It’s the perfect height!”
“Actually, it’s kind of lovely.”
And then, from the last of us:
“Yes, okay, but – look at that big gap in the middle, d’you see…”
Etc., etc., for the appropriate amount of time. Then:
“What about this one?”
“Ooo…”
“Loren?”
“I like it. Also, my toes are cold.”
“Mom? What do you think?”
A pause, and then an approving nod.
“…Okay, yeah. It’s a nice tree.”
And so it was settled.
We joined hands around the tree for a minute, and said something like a thank you. It’s a thing my family does.
This time, Evie cut it down. In one go. All by herself. She was all pink in the face and proud of herself, after. Then I picked up one end of the tree and dad grabbed the other, and we began the walk back up the hill to the barn.
People dressed in red and green appeared out of the woodwork to help my dad lift the tree and set it on top of the Jeep and strap it down, carefully, while the young ones snuck candy-canes into our coat pockets. And then we all piled into the car and drove, carefully, until we turned left into the driveway and were home.
And then it was time for the tree stand, and untangling ropes of Christmas lights, and carrying boxes down from the attic. Someone put a John Denver and the Muppets Christmas CD in the player. A stand mixer was retrieved from the depths of a cupboard, and a cookbook was flipped open to the correct page, and someone added
half a pound of sugar,
some vanilla,
a package of cream cheese, and
a tad less than a stick of butter
into the bowl, and mixed them up, and set it outside in the snow to chill.
And in the back of my head, I remembered other Decembers, a long time ago, when Sara was here, and we’d roll out cookie dough on the island in the kitchen and cut out the shapes of rabbits and snowmen and pine trees and angels, and you could tell the exact time they were ready to take out of the oven by the smell.
And then I looked up to see my little sister, who wasn’t little any more, standing at the kitchen counter and meticulously mixing drops of food coloring into the frosting until she’d found exactly the right shade, until she had a rainbow laid out in front of her.
And it was dark outside, because the days were shorter, for a while.
But on the inside there was joy, for just a moment, and the house smelled like cookies and pine needles.
And soon there will be familiar ornaments – old friends, almost forgotten – and my Dad will read the first stave of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
And I’ll stay up later than anyone else and I’ll set down my phone and I’ll lay on the couch and look at the lights on the tree and breathe in the smell of pine.
And it’s so dark outside. Dark, and cold, and forbidding. And there’s this stupidly illusive feeling that I almost remember from childhood, that I often think I should be feeling, when 101.3 switches over to their Christmas playlist, when the choir starts singing carols on the street. But it’s sometimes very, very hard to feel.
Until that moment. When it’s so dark outside that my sister insists that it’s time to get a tree. When the lights go up in the garden and around the edge of the front porch, not just at our house, but at every house in the town and across the city and around the world.
I’m not sure, but I think it’s a manifestation of an ancient, stubborn human impulse – to make our own light in the darkness, to strike a match against the cold. Even as we’re closest to the sun.
At the very beginning of an excellent children’s book – A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle – there’s a scene where Meg can’t sleep for worrying, so she goes downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of hot cocoa.
She found her little brother, and a saucepan of milk on the stove, and they were mostly exclusive about it.
Sometimes, when I’m alone in my own attic bedroom and I can’t sleep for worrying, I get up and go downstairs and make hot cocoa, and sometimes it helps.
This evening, I also made a largish batch of macaroni & cheese for the weekend, and cleaned up the kitchen, and listened to my parents’ Christmas CDs, and played with a dog who also kind of needed that.
Solace comes from the weirdest places. Sometimes the most effective act of self-soothing and a bad habit can be exactly the same thing. Sometimes the thing that you know you need to do to take care of yourself is the one thing that you know is going to hurt the most. Letting go, speaking out, turning around and going back, saying the words you’ve been keeping inside. Those moments can fucking sting like anything, and they’re also frequently the moments when the multiverse shifts and everything changes for good.
“It’s in every one of us to be wise. Find your heart, open up both your eyes. We can all know everything without ever knowing why. It’s in every one of us, by and by…”
~ John Denver
Never stop changing, continue to grow, do the uncomfortable things over and over again until you are comfortable being uncomfortable. You are constantly becoming.
And – somehow, at the same time -remember that it is also okay to rest, to set down the burdens for just a little while. They’ll be there later, when you come back, if you choose to. Take a moment to just be where you are, and appreciate the little things. It’s all we’ve got, you see. And at the same time, it’s everything.
✨
When I was very little, I used to fall asleep in the back of the car on long car rides at night, and I can remember my dad scooping me up and carrying me up the front steps and into the house. Specifically, I remember his whiskers, I remember his footsteps, the gravel of under his shoes and the creaking of the hinges of the front door.
We used to look up at the stars, and feel so small.
It’s an unexpectedly comforting perspective.
“It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates, on a minor planet, orbiting an average star, in the outer suburbs of one among a hundred billion galaxies. But, ever since the dawn of civilization, people have craved for an understanding of an underlying order of the world. There ought to be something very special about the outer conditions of the universe. And what can be more special than that there is no boundary. There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”
~ Stephen Hawking, in the movie The Theory of Everything, muchhh paraphrased
Coming home is an awkward shift, and sometimes it takes time.
I’m thinking about my dad coming home from work, every day, for years and years. His car would crown the crest of the hill, and he’d swing over to the mailbox across the road, and then pull in the driveway, turn the engine off.
The dogs would get so very excited about this.
Those first few minutes after arriving were a sacred thing. “I’m not really here yet,” he used to say, not unkindly, if we tried to talk to him before he was ready. He’d walk up the front steps and into the house, greet the dogs or cats or whoever was there, and put his dishes in the dishwasher and his bag on the hook on the back of the door, and then he’d say “I’ve got to change out of my work clothes,” and disappear into a closet off the laundry room, and take a minute to himself. He’d emerge in his comfortable sweats, tired, and then he’d be ready to be caught up in the things going on at home again. Or maybe not ready, but willing.
I’ve never thought of this habit as a ritual, but it could have been. I think that routine was most of what separated his work life from his home life, his work-self and home-self, his out-of-the-house mask and the face he wore for us.
Because, I think – the person you are at home isn’t quite the same as the person you are anywhere else in the world.
To anyone who needs to hear this today:
When you come home, remember to change into your comfy clothes. Take off your work face. Adjust to being surrounded by people who know all the things about you that a well-crafted facade can hide. The quirks and flaws and breaking points, the little-known strengths, all the growth and changes you’ve been through to get to where you are. It’s a messy and vulnerable and awkward space, and – not without work – hopefully a safe space, most of the time.
Most of the time. But sometimes there’s so much friction where the edges meet that the earth quakes. So I think that it helps to know where those edges are, just so that you can keep an eye on them.
When you’ve stepped out of the picture for a little while, and then you’ve come back, it sometimes takes time to remember where you used to fit in. Because the shapes of the edges have changed a little in the intervening time. Nothing stays the same – and it shouldn’t, really.
The place you came from won’t look the same as it did before you went out into the world and did the things, and you’re not quite the same, either. Going out into the world and doing the things has this way of doing that to a person.
And the genuinely uncomfortable thing is, things might not fit exactly the way they used to. And it might take time to acclimate, even in a familiar space. There might be shaky moments of wondering if there’s still a place for you, where there used to be.
But there is one. That’s the amazing thing. Somewhere, there is a place where you can put your feet on the table and snag food that you didn’t pay for out of the refrigerator and fall asleep on the couch and exist in a space where there are people who aren’t strangers who love you even though you’re frequently cranky and tired and very far from perfect.
It might take time, and that’s okay. But there is always a place to come home to, even if you’re different than you were before.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
When I touched down in Germany, Kathrin met me at the airport. I think I saw her first, and we hugged for a good long time. She was so good to me. She helped me let my parents know I was with her and safe, and insisted on carrying my backpack for me, and guided my sleep-deprived, travel-weary self through the airport halls and train stations and buses and dark, rainy streets of Münster and up the many flights of stairs to home.
She also gave me food.
The first thing I ate when I got there was a homemade Snickers bar from one of her roommates. It was sticky and gooey and nothing like a Snickers bar, and it was perfect.
Then there was a plain joghurt (yogurt) drink, and a Turkish pastry wrapped in paper with sheep’s cheese and spinach and pine nuts on the inside. I’d been living on coffee and cheap snacks for too many hours, and it was soo good. Everything was.
Her apartment smelled like someone had just finished cooking with spices, and other smells that I liked but couldn’t identify. I later gathered that I was probably picking up on a mixture of scented candle smoke and possibly hops and weed.
On my first night there, close to midnight, I sat at the kitchen table while Kathrin stood at the stove and minded a frying pan, with her hair tied up in a floppy bun.
Kathrin had just gotten back from her own adventures in Italy, and had brought back peppers and greens and garlic that grew there. She mixed them with chickpeas – she told me they’re called “giggling peas,” in German.
Kathrin loves cooking the way my brother-in-law loves beer, the way my little sister appreciates anything that can be loosely interpreted as even a little gay.
That was the first warm, home-cooked food since shepherd’s pie at the kitchen table with my mom, dad and little sister. The vegetables from Italy were a wonderful beginning, and afterwards I went to bed and slept for hours.
That was the first night.
In the following days, no small part of experiencing Münster was trying the food.
Several days a week, there is a food market in the cobblestone square by the Dom – the church in the center of Old Town, Münster. It’s crowded, and colorful, and smells amazing – like fish and bread and cake and cheese and meat and strawberries and fresh orange juice and street food. That first morning, with Kathrin, I tried sausage and saur kraut and fried potatoes. Later, there would be cheese and apple cider and sausages and ham. She ran into a friend she knew on the other side of a vegetable stall, and they exchanged hugs. Later, that friend ran over and brought us a paper dish of pistachio ice cream.
Kathrin works in the kitchen at the Hafenkäserei, the harbor cheese factory. I first visited during a party after the whole crew met to discuss the menu for the fall. She stood up at the end of the table and said “this is my cousin from America,” and I sat in a corner and tried to blend into a wall for awhile until the shyness thawed.
I’d never had Pizza & Beer before and I immediately understood why that is a thing.
Specifically, I tried a radler, which I found out is essentially like bubbly fruit juice with a bitter aftertaste and a roughly 2% alcohol content.
A few days later, I found my way back to the cheese factory
(left out of the apartment, left and then another left onto the promenade, left at the statue of a giraffe, through the intersection, under the bridge, right at the apothecary with the rainbow over the door, left towards the golden tree at the intersection with the pizza place on the corner, straight past the water, left into the driveway and you’re there)
and I sat at the bar and I tried a fried cheese ball and cheesy soup and bread and a salad with lemon dressing and a mango sorbet for dessert. I think there was peppermint tea, afterwards, and then I biked home and went to sleep.
The first phrase I learned how to say out of necessity was “Ich hätte gern ein Kaffee mit mich, bitte.” (I would like a coffee with milk, please.) At first I was shy and quiet and most people couldn’t hear me, much less understand my broken German. I became more confident with time.
I’d eaten sort-of-gluten-free for years and years, because for various reasons that’s how my family eats, at home. I’d decided that in Germany I would experiment with not worrying and just trying things. For one thing, in most of Europe the growing of wheat crops is done without some of the methods practiced in America that make my mother worried.
And so it was here that I re-discovered bread.
Not just the pre-sliced, whole wheat bread of my childhood, or the crumbly homemade gluten-free alternatives we sometimes make at home. Round rolls that were crusty on the outside and covered in seeds. Thick, triangular wedges, layered like pastries, that melted like butter in your mouth. I went to town in the bakeries, for a while there, and I don’t regret a thing.
Grocery shopping in another language, much less with a different currency, was fascinating for me.
When I met Kathrin’s mother, I fell asleep on the couch while mother and daughter cooked greens and squash and lamb chops for dinner. We talked about astrology over quark with applesauce for dessert.
When I left Münster and visited other places, I found that each city had its own signature dish. Amsterdam offered waffles, sandwiched together with syrup inside. Hamburg’s tradition is called Lobskaus, fried eggs and pickled herring served with a mash of beets and potatoes and arugula. Allegedly, sailors used to eat this dish to cure hangovers. Prague served a cylindrical fry-bread called Trdeník. In Kraków, street vendors on every corner solid a pretzel-like bread twisted into the shape of a ring the size of a dinner plate.
At almost every hostel, I made myself a frying pan of vegetables – peppers, onions, mushrooms, greens. Cooking helped me feel at home, and centered, and I think it was probably good for me.
At every hostel that served breakfast, I would stuff rolls and fruit and hard-boiled eggs in my pockets, while the staff looked the other way.
In Oświęcim, after visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau, I needed a little chocolate. I threw a small piece into the woods, to say thank you to the company that walked with me and got me through that day.
In the train stations on the way back to Kathrin, I slipped into a pattern of Starbucks and McDonalds that had never been a lifestyle of mine before then. It got me through for a little while, but I missed the good stuff, the things that don’t taste the same every time you eat them.
I’ve just landed back in Münster. Today I got coffee with Kathrin, and she was surprised at the confidence with which I ordered my coffee and orange juice. Apparently I also agreed to try oat milk by mistake, but that’s okay with me. We also split a bagel with onions and cream cheese, and she told me she’ll eat that whenever she’s feeling homesick for the states.
I’m feeling homesick for the states.
Right now I’m sitting at a small Lebanese grill called Karamna – it’s close to the cheese factory, across from a movie theater. I can confidently say that they serve the best cheeseburgers anywhere I’ve been in the world. I found this place in my first week away from home – I tried to order in German but kept tripping up, and this was the first place where someone I didn’t know switched the conversation to English for my sake. It’s happened to me many times since, and it’s a simple thing, but it counts.
When I was younger, I used to hate geography. I wanted to learn my way around the back-roads and woods around my house. I didn’t care about the names and shapes of places I’d never been.
Oh, I understood about continents and oceans, and countries, states, and capitals, and climates and borders and whatnot. Just one of those things I vaguely know and can’t remember how I learned. I just never paid attention to the names for things. They were far away, not part of my little world.
I was also mostly unschooled, as a kid – which doesn’t mean I didn’t learn, it just means I was free. I did a lot of listening to grown-ups, talking, but not necessarily talking at me. I mostly read books and played with fractions, and stretched out on my trampoline in the sun, and sat on the porch during thunderstorms, and walked around barefoot in the dirt.
It was a good time.
A few years later, I’ve somehow become the kind of person who can decide to take a sabbatical from getting a math degree to go backpacking solo around Western Europe with several books and absolutely no plan.
Now that I see those two people written down next to each other, I am noticing that they have some things in common.
When backpacking Europe, a little knowledge of geography is nice to have. Google maps became my friend, and possibly a crutch. I think that physically traveling – working out the logistics of where things are relative to each other, of distance and time – has a way of teaching me things in a way that’ll stick. There’s a difference between staring at small, labeled dots in the middle of seemingly random squiggly shapes, and waking the streets of a city.
It’s something about the feel of the sidewalks under your soles, the subtle details in the colors and shapes of the buildings, the weather, the light, the breeze in your face. And then there’s the spirit in the people. Each place has a distinct character, a personality, a self. A city is living thing, made up of/maintained by/shat on by a lot of other living things… a city has a center, and a rhythm, and a history and constant growth, and just a touch of pride. They are all so different, and it’s beautiful.
When I got home to Münster I stayed in a hostel because I’d woken up covered in bug bites somewhere in Poland and I didn’t want to take the risk of bringing anything to Kathrin’s place by sleeping there.
And it was a nice hostel. The walls were stenciled with the words “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list,” and also a rough map of this side of the world. I slept in the top bunk, that time. Just like when I was a kid. I also rebelled and slept with my feet pointed the wrong way so that I had a better view of the map on the wall. I thought about how far I’d come, all the places I’d been, how big it had felt. And then I was struck by how little Germany looks, compared to Europe. Compared to the whole world. There’s so much there I’ve never seen, and some that I never will.
I fell asleep staring at the map on that wall, and when I woke up, Kathrin was somehow miraculously there and shaking me awake because I’d overslept and missed the train we’d booked and I wasn’t answering my phone and she’d gotten worried, and I put on my boots and coat, and slung The Backpack (too heavy, that backpack, why did I pack so many clothes) over my shoulder, and we ran like hell to the train station at 5AM because I needed to catch a plane because Evie wants me home for Thanksgiving.
The last time my boots touched the earth in Europe was running with Kathrin through the mist and the dark of that morning. I was running too fast to stop and say a proper goodbye. (Train stations and airports exist in a sort of alternative dimension of their own, at least in my head, and somehow they don’t count.)
And so – well, you know, darn. I guess I’ll just have to go back.
In Leipzig, I met a man from San Francisco who has been traveling for nine months out of the year for seven years. I asked him how he does it. He says he’s an electrician and a Pizza Delivery Guy, and he travels to the more affordable countries, and he is extremely frugal. I told him I’d washed my laundry in the sink, for the first time, just a few days ago. We both agreed that this is not my last adventure away from home.
He was going home for Thanksgiving, too.
Because we all have to go home, once in a while. It’s where the deepest roots are. And I – I’ve asked myself to do and acknowledge and marvel at so much, and a person gets tired, after a while. It is important to remember that it’s more than okay to take breaks. It’s vitally important. And Evie wants me to be there.
So I’m coming back.
But now I’ve got my own map of the world, in my heart, and there are soo many blank spaces.
I’ve booked myself a train Leipzig, Germany, and two nights at a hostel there. The hostel has a laundry service and a fully stocked kitchen, which means I can cook the vegetables I bought in Dresden and also dry my clothes.
My boots are still sopping wet and cold. I’m sitting in the train station in the flip-flops I found in Berlin because I think it’s a better idea than putting those boots back on my feet right now. I probably should have just put up with the smell for another couple of days, but my embarrassment got the better of me. Thanks a lot, Cheese Guy.
The interior of the train station doesn’t have heat, so I am sitting in a patch of sunlight by a window. Kind of barefoot.
I’m doing okay.
Since I landed on this side of the pond, I have been surrounded by the street people. At least one person every day has approached me asking for a little money, or some food.
It started in Münster. I was sitting on a bench in the cobblestoned square by the Dom on a Sunday, and the sun was shining for the first time in days, and the church bells were chiming, and a scruffy looking man came up to me and asked me if I had a very specific quantity of change – maybe like 37 cents. He asked in German but I understood, which was a new and strange experience.
A few minutes later, and old woman walked over with a sign in English saying she needed donations for her hungry grandchildren. Her voice was low, and soft, and persistent, and sounded like a morning dove.
When I left the square – feeling a little shaken, this had never happened to me before – there was a woman sitting with her back to the stone foundation of a bakery. She held a paper cup in her hands, and she just smiled at me.
Another man sits everyday beside the entrance to the movie theater, with no paper cup, just a cupped and weathered hand, outstretched.
A few days later, a young woman asked me for money to help take care of her baby. She was younger than I am. I don’t know why, but there was something in her eyes I didn’t trust. Through a language barrier, I offered to buy her food. But she didn’t want food. I opened my wallet and she saw a twenty euro note and she asked if she could have it, so that she could feed her baby.
It was in that moment that I realized that I needed to learn how to say no.
At the bus station in Hamburg, a thin, friendly woman said “speak English? Could you possibly have any spare change?” and smiled conspiratorially, and winked.
Two minutes later, a man came up to me and asked for two Euros towards a barbecue sandwich from McDonalds. He told me that he really liked barbecue.
In Berlin, it was different.
I was walking downtown by the river and a woman marched right up to me and said, “speak English?” When I nodded, she showed me a piece of paper written in English that said she lived on the street and needed money for food. When I gave her a little she insisted on just a little more.
When I visited the East Side gallery, a woman with a clipboard approached me and asked me to sign a piece of paper to help her with her baby’s ear surgery – she told me he was deaf. I gave a little, I signed the clipboard. She got angry and upset with me for not giving her more, and I stood there not knowing what to do, and eventually said “I am sorry.” I walked away feeling angry at myself.
I was about a mile away when I realized that there was an orange in my backback that I could have given her, and I felt even worse.
Sitting with their backs to the Berlin Wall, there were two men with several paper cups and cardboard signs spread out in front of them. The generous could choose to contribute to their funds for either groceries, beer, weed, or LSD.
There were musicians. One man playing the accordion, another with a battered old violin.
There was a woman dressed up as a clown by the Brandenburg gate. “Photo, photo?” she asked, quite cheerfully, beckoning me over. I noticed that her teeth were almost brown. We took a selfie, and then she held out her hand for the spare change.
On my way out of Berlin I bought myself some chocolate, for medicinal purposes. I ended up giving most of it to an old man on the bridge by the train station.
Prague was the worst.
It was cold there, below freezing. And you couldn’t walk down a street in the old town without passing several of them. They knelt, bent over into something like a child’s pose, arms and hands extended holding paper cups, foreheads resting on the ground.
I saw a man eating rotten strawberries out of a trash can.
Many sat with puppies in their laps or wrapped up in blankets beside them – for the possible advantage of the cuteness factor, or for the added sympathy for having another mouth to feed, or for the warmth? I saw very few fully grown dogs, in Prague, and that haunted me.
In Krakow, Poland, a young, good looking fellow stopped me in the street and offered me a rose. He then produced a book and asked me to sign it. I didn’t have change, and I told him so. He took the flower back out of my hands, and walked away.
A few blocks later I happened upon a street vendor that was selling flowers, and noticed some familiar-looking roses.
There was a man standing by the entrance to a church, with his eyes closed and his hand outstretched. When I came back later he had gone, and an old woman stood there in his place.
Later, at night, an old man whose face looked like a skull sat with his back to the wall and a hat out in front of him, arms around his knees. When I walked past him the first time, he almost glared at me.
In Oświęcim… that was a different kind of place. A smaller town, where nobody really had any money. The only time I felt like someone wanted something from me was when I stood in front of the gallows at Auschwitz I, and that time I genuinely could do nothing.
Today, in Dresden – this is going to sound familiar, but – I’d bought myself some chocolate for medicinal purposes, and I found a room in the train station that was warm, with seats, and there was an old man there who was sleeping there and I – well.
When I stop and think, I can’t believe – I am twenty years old, and I didn’t know. I’d never seen. I have been so sheltered.
I can almost say that everything I have is in a backpack on my shoulders, that I can identify with these people. And then I remember that it isn’t true, because far away across an ocean there is a room in my parent’s house, and I’m not a materialistic human, but there are actually quite a lot of books there, and a pretty nice guitar, and there is clothing, and other things I have simply because I wanted them. I remember that I worked through some of high school and all of college, and that I qualified for aid from the state, and that I was unexpectedly gifted some funding towards school for being a halfway-decent student and writing scholarship applications well, and so I’m secure in the knowledge that I can put a roof over my own head every night, and that I can eat, and I have a degree and I have skills and when I get home I can go get a job, and I have identification papers and a bank account, that I have a car that’ll hopefully still work, for a little while longer.
So I can’t identify with their experiences. Not really.
But now I know. I don’t fully understand, I don’t know if I have earned the rite to say I can empathize.
I am sitting on a train to Leipzig, in a seat by the window where I can rest my feet beside the radiator, wondering what the hell I can do.
Yesterday evening was cold, and dark, and it was raining hard. I finally caved and ducked inside a shop on the street and bought a cheap umbrella. It is purple, and I am firmly convinced that it was an excellent decision.
I trudged through the puddles along the promenade, slightly less soaked that I might have been, and shivering. It was a twenty minute walk to Kathy’s apartment. I was later than I’d meant to be, and a little anxious/angry at myself, for that.
But I made it. I hadn’t walked down her street since I’d gotten back, and it felt so familiar. It felt like coming home.
I’d lost my keys, somewhere along the way. I reached the top of the many flights of stairs, rang the doorbell. Left my shoes outside the door, went upstairs, and took a shower. I felt like I recognized every little detail in that apartment – the creak of the staircase, the ceramic soap dish shaped like a hand, the tarnished key in the bathroom door, the light switches, the light and the smell of the kitchen.
Kathrin was already cooking.
She set me to work preparing the Brussels sprouts, and I turned on a John Denver & the Muppets Christmas album that is an almost tangible part of my childhood. She loved it.
There was a goose simmering in the oven, and creamy sußkartofflen on the stove, and she’d already dried bread for stuffing.
Kathrin had brought Thanksgiving to Germany years ago. It makes perfect sense – she’s passionate about food, about researching recipes, trying creative new combinations. She has a gift. And her father – my uncle – is an American; she was born in the states, spent the first few years of her life there. She misses it, and dreams of going back, one day.
So she brought the tradition of an American holiday focused on food to her community in Germany. And everybody loves it. In previous years, she’s cooked enough food to share with friends and anyone from apartment complex who happened to drop by.
This year, it wasn’t actually on Thanksgiving because I’d been told I needed to be home with my parents and little sister by then, but I’d asked if we could share that thing together anyway. And it was only a small gathering. No boys allowed. She’d invited an old roommate and a good friend that I’d met once before, and one of her flatmates was home at the right time to sit down with us.
We all of us were willing to help, in small ways, but she did most of it herself. It’s like watching someone dance, when she cooks. It’s almost a science. All the right things at the right time for a specific outcome. It’ll occur to her to try something, and she’ll think for a moment, and then decide, and go with it.
She’d never made or eaten stuffing before, but I told her about it and on her first attempt she created something from that picture in her head that was as wonderful as the dish I’ve been eating at home for years. But it wasn’t exactly the same. She added two kinds of mushrooms, based on a hunch, and it worked perfectly.
We stood by the stove and ate Brussels sprouts out of the pan with our fingers. They were so good.
We sat together and shared the food, and we were together and happy and complete, and she was smiling. I kept the music from my phone playing quietly through the speakers. There was Amaretto and sweet tea. Her best friend had a smoke in the next room, afterwards. Other roommates came home and were greeted with hugs and leftovers on the stove.
Before I left, she told me she wanted to go with me to the airport to see me off. Either way would have been fine with me, but I’m happy inside.
We hugged goodnight, and I walked back to my hostel in the dark, feeling as full of joy leaving as I’d felt nervous and embarrassed and cranky on the way. I was still playing music on my phone, and it had stopped raining, and I knew exactly how to get to where I was going.
Thinking back over the past week or so, reading over the things I’ve been writing – I’m pretty certain that I’ve been in a negative place. I think maybe walking in concentration camps can do that to a person. I am also road-weary, and tired, and it’s okay to be all of those things. I think perhaps I’ve earned them.
I choose to write from a place of honesty and openness because I think it’s important. I think if I can find it in myself to get up and talk about the challenges I’m experiencing in any given moment, something in my experience is going to ring true with somebody else. We’re less alone, that way.
But I think it also might sometimes be hard to read. I’ve been telling people to put their shields up. I think as soon as I start to give the negative things that kind of floor space, it’s very easy for them to take over, and suddenly the picture is skewed.
Most of it just is, and most of it has something to do with perspective. I’m thinking about trying to write with an intention to pull things into a balance. Like riding a bicycle, or that moment devoted entirely to physical steadiness just after picking up something heavy – like a backpack, or a laundry bag.
I am almost far enough away from these experiences to be able to look at them objectively, and sit with them, and maybe not be at peace, but be present. I won’t forget. Not ever. My intention is to take this energy and try to make it into something good.
But first I need to get myself home, and settled, and shift focus to self-care things, and breathe.
A few days ago, I was messaging back and forth with a good, old friend, and she asked me what it’s been like for me:
“So how is hostel life? I don’t really know what else to call it, lol.”
Hostel life is new, and strange, and exciting, and it’s teaching me how to live with other people, and also how to take care of myself.
Every few days, a different bed, a different kitchen, a different place to come back to.
In Hamburg, I walked an hour from the bus station to my hostel at four in the morning. The hostel was a little grimy and questionable around the edges – but there was a carpeted stage, and a loft, and a long table where I met some of the best people I’ve found on this trip.
In Berlin, the hostel occupied the bottom few floors of an old building with twisting, narrow halls and graphite on the stairway walls. It was the kind of building you could get lost in within about two minutes. If one was to go up too many sets of stairs, the lights went out, and there were piles of dusty old clothes in the corners. Possibly the kindest staff and most efficiently run place I found.
In Prague, it took me about ten minutes to the entrance to the building, even though I was standing right outside of it. The signage was small and hard to find, and the hostel shared a building with a Thai massage business on the ground floor. But there were free cookies in the kitchen, and I stayed there in the middle of the week on a Thursday; I felt like I was the only one there.
Even though each new place has its own personality and idiosyncrasies and quirks, there are some things that they all have in common, (in this one part of the world, at least.)
I typically choose to stay in dorms with six or eight bunks, total. On each unoccupied bunk there would be a mattress, a pillow, and a quilt, non of them covered. The reception desk gives each traveler a clean set of sheets – pillow case, bottom sheet, and a bag-like cover for the quilt. Each guest at the hostel is responsible for making their own bed. Beside each bunk there is a power outlet, a lamp, and possibly a small shelf.
Each guest is also issued a locker – bring your own padlock, just in case – as a safe place to store luggage for the duration of a stay.
I’ve stayed in rooms with private baths, and some hostels with only about two or three showers for everyone to share.
Then there are the kitchens. You never know what you’ll get, with kitchens. Often, the frying pans and spatulas have seen better days, and the knives could use an edge, but at least they’re there. Once, I got to a hostel with a grocery bag full of uncooked vegetables to find that their kitchen didn’t have a stove.
Sometimes, there is free coffee and tea in the mornings; a few places had all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets till noon. (When it comes to filling up a bag for later, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.)
There’s a certain etiquette to shared kitchen spaces. Clean up after yourself. Label your food in the refrigerator. Thou shalt not steal. Common sense things.
That etiquette extends beyond the kitchen, too. A sign in a hallway at a hostel in Berlin reads “Please be quietly! People sleep right here.”
Backpacking hostels are the epitome of those places where tired humans at their best and worst and most open and joyful and grumpy and disgusting are thrown together into cramped spaces, and fully expected to peacefully coexist.
It’s different, from place to place.
Sometimes it’s flooded bathroom floors, and bed bugs, and waking up at seven in the morning because the people in the next bunk aren’t being subtle about it, and sometimes it’s the snoring that you’d swear to god is making the walls shake, and sometimes it’s the smell of boots that’ve been walked in for weeks and weeks.
Sometimes there is a sense of community, of shared responsibility for one another – altruism and generosity and of course you can use the frying pan when I’m done. The best moments are moments of friendliness. “Where do you come from? What brings you here? What have you seen while you were here, and what would you recommend?”
Hostel life is teaching me how to live with people. I need to be able to exist in the same space as another person’s human flaws. I need to be able to speak up and ask for what I need, which is frequently challenging and I need to be able to fend for myself. I need to be able to find out what the rules are, even if it’s through making mistakes. I need to be able to be considerate in the general direction of other people, because it makes a difference. In both directions. And I need to be able to talk to people, be with people, even strangers, because it fends off the loneliness, and it fills me with smiles.
She’s in Florida right now. A few months ago, she got a text message from a stranger who told her a story about playing in a pond in her backyard with her brothers when he was younger. He turned out to be a long-lost cousin.
He dropped by the house last summer. After about five seconds of conversation it became evident that they are very much related, even though they haven’t seen each other since they were little.
He invited my parents down for a family reunion in Florida this month. My mom won’t go anywhere without my dad, even though we’re all pretty sure that she could.
They’re all staying together in a half-million dollar house. They’re a 15 minute drive from a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, this cousin also scored them tickets to Universal Studios.
I cannot remember my parents ever doing this kind of thing. It sounds like they’re having fun.
My dad told me that just being able to go for a walk in shorts and a t-shirt in the morning in November, and see a cactus growing in somebody’s front yard, and notice differently shaped trees, and catch the occasional glimpse of the ocean, is more than enough for him. He was walking when I called him the other day, and at one point he stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
“Dad? What is it?”
“I’m looking at a hedge,” he said, slowly, “that is made of rosemary. A hedge made of rosemary plants.” He was quiet for a minute. “It’s taller than I am.”
I miss my dad.
He’s an introvert, like me. He needs his time away from people to recharge. Opposite end of the spectrum from my mom – when I woke up at 10 here she was still awake, because she stayed up into the wee hours of the morning talking to people she’s related to, somehow, that she’s only just meeting now.
In the last couple of days I’ve felt – I don’t know. Yesterday I kept feeling like something was wrong somewhere, like someone important was in trouble, and I kept messaging people like “how are you? Are you okay?” I told my sister this and she told me in the kindest way possible that I should check in with myself. And I – yeah.
Yep.
There is only one person in the world I can talk to when I feel like this, when I’m on the verge of something like a little child’s meltdown, and be my honest ugly horrible self, and know that I’ll still be loved afterwards.
It’s frequently messy and awful when that person lives under the same roof as me. But when I’m out here alone, in a city I’ve never heard of, and I need to talk to someone, and I am scared that if I open up to anyone else I’ll damage them or drive them away with all of the things that are hurting in my body/mind/heart right now, it’s –
it’s good to have a mother.
She’s a force of nature, my mom. She works in construction. She once met Isaac Asimov asked him if he believed in God. All of the boyfriends my little sister and I have ever had have been at least a little afraid of her. She likes to play in the dirt, and frequently grows more vegetables than a family of four could possibly eat in a year. She’s a licensed massage therapist. She used to make pottery, and it’s beautiful stuff. She was a secretary for something like 16 years and hated every moment of it, except for the part where she met my dad. She’s into alternative nutrition and eats coconut oil by the spoonful because she read that it’s good for your brain. She had us eating gluten free before it became a fad, and she’ll only buy food that’s organic and non-GMO and she sources our meat from places where she believes they had good lives, munching on grass under the sun. She makes her own chocolate and saur kraut. She always wears the same pair of overalls and muddy boots, with her hair tucked back under a ball cap. She and my father like to dance at weddings. She grew up in a house with three older brothers and is consequently tough as nails and perpetually wary. She’s a little scatter-brained, and doesn’t like to let things go in case they might one day be useful, and is usually later than she meant to be. Whenever we’re getting ready to leave the house for more than a couple days, she rushes around trying to do everything that’s been on her to-do list for weeks that somehow haven’t gotten done yet. She spends a lot of time at home, and she can talk forever, if someone is willing to listen. She swears like a trucker. She cried for days when our big orange cat went missing and didn’t come home again.
We clash in so many ways. Not just me and my mom. All of us, in all directions.
But we can also sit around the kitchen table and talk and laugh at my sister’s humor and my dad’s bad puns and cook and eat good food and watch Marvel movies in the living room on summer nights when the days are long, and sometimes we can even get our shit together enough to go camping, and sometimes they’ll dance in the kitchen, my mom and my dad, and it’s a happy and a reassuring thing to see.
This morning my mom listened to all of my unfiltered negativity and tiredness, and then told me matter-of-factly that I need to book myself a plane ticket from Boston to Rochester instead of taking a bus. She told me she’d sleep better knowing I had that ticket.
She asked me what support looks like, and then said that of course she’d help me to make sure that I have an appointment with the mental-health doctor’s office when I get home.
Dresden, Germany, is the first place I ever experienced the feeling of not knowing if I was going to have a safe place to sleep for a night.
I got to Dresden at one o’clock in the morning, on a bus that should have gotten there at twenty-three but hadn’t because we’d been stopped at the border between Poland and Germany for a passport check. (The officer saw my last name and thought of the football team and was like “Ah, cool!!”) The hostel was an hour’s walk away from the train station.
Also, the hostel had messaged me earlier telling me I should let them know if I expected to arrive there after 22:30, because that was when reception closed, and they hadn’t gotten back to me when I’d told them that my bus would get to Dresden after hours. I should have called them.
On top of everything else, I’d sat in the back of the bus, the seat without a power outlet, because it was cheap, and both my power bank and my phone were dying.
I started walking.
Dresden is one of the places that the allies bombed the shit out of in WWII. You can tell because the buildings are new, newer than some of the places I’ve been in America. It’s quiet there. And at night, it’s just a little scary.
I walked over a bridge across the Elbe river that separates Altstadt Dresden from Neustadt, (old-town from new-town.) Strains of Queen – “we will/we will/rock you” and “I can’t get no/satisfaction” drifted towards me across the water.
I found a power outlet in the entrance to a hotel that looked wayyyy outside of my price range; the doors were made of glass. I stood for a moment and plugged in my phone. When the man behind the desk noticed I was there, I sort of ran away.
My hostel had sent me a message. “hey, r u still coming tonight?” They said I could check in after hours.
I walked there. I got settled.
I had a bed to sleep in, and that was a good thing.
Most of the clothes I’ve worn and carried with me are first treated to a good scrubbing in hot water and the suds of the cheapest soap I could find. Drain the sink. Rinse in cold water. Repeat. Wring them out by hand till there’s almost no water left in them, then lay them out or hang them over the back of any and every available surface in my hotel room.
I am immediately concerned about making sure there’s something dry enough to wear tomorrow. Opening the window to let the breeze in lets in the cold and doesn’t seem to be working, so I crank the radiators up to full blast. I remember from a ninth-grade earth science lesson that warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air.
In the back of my head I am vaguely hoping that nothing catches on fire this evening.
Afterwards, my hands are papery-dry and so wrinkled that my phone doesn’t recognize my fingerprint.
The improvised spritzer-bottle/plastic water bottle with holes punched in the lid worked fine. Higher ratio of H2O2 to water than anticipated – I had to play with it a little to get the balance right. I think my boots are better than they were before, and it’s something, and something is good enough.
I just want to say that I’d never done this before. I am learning to make due with what I have and also recognize that there’s an alternative thing to try when one thing seems overwhelming and too much and I really just need clean clothes in the morning and have been putting it off for long enough.
And now it’s time to sleep, because the time will pass by faster that way, and hopefully the clothes will be dry in the morning.
Follow the link above to watch my YouTube video, in which you can see my face and hear my voice as I talk about: stinky shoes and what to do about them, doing laundry in a hostel sink, and what it’s like when neither of the people having sex in the dorm room you’re sharing is you.
The first time everything had felt unfamiliar. The second time it felt like I was stepping back in time to the previous day, and living it over again.
Except that I got to the bus station early, instead of running for twenty minutes to get to a bus that I knew would leave in twenty-five. And this time, I knew where the bathrooms were, where to store my luggage, where the information desk was, where the shuttle bus was going.
I went to the information desk to ask for help. In a voice that was much clearer and more confident than I was feeling, I said: “I was here yesterday and I saw Auschwitz I. Today I’ve come back because I want to see Auschwitz II. How do I do that?”
The woman on the other side of the glass looked surprised, but she told me what to do.
I would not need a ticket this time. Aside from a few places that are roped off because they are unsafe, Birkenau is completely open to the public during the day.
I took the bus instead of walking. I told my parents where I was going.
When I got to the gate, I started to feel cold and shaky again.
I called in the Grandfathers. I had never done that for myself before. I was clumsy but I did it, and I can confidently say that I felt more supported and less alone. My mind was clear.
You can still smell the ashes. It’s a metallic tang, in the air, in the back of your throat.
Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau has been mostly reduced to ruins. It’s rubble, and ashes, and barbed-wire fences, and it is heart-wrenchingly vast.
The first thing I saw when I got through the gates was a faint rainbow in the sky above what used to be the woman’s barracks. It made my heart sing.
I walked a worn dirt road lined with barbed wire fencing, so long and straight that it seemed to go on forever. Those selected for death in the gas chambers were herded along that same road.
All around me, there were the ruins of the men’s camp, the places they used to sleep and eat and hurt on the inside and out. Here, the only remaining corner of a red brick building, there, a free standing chimney. Everywhere rectangular remnants of stone foundations, overgrown with moss and lichen and wildflowers and tall grass. It seemed to stretch on for as far as the eye could see in all directions, all that was left of this place that used to house an industry of dying.
It was so quiet there, so peaceful. I have never been anywhere with as much solemn-ness and reverence as that place. In its own way, it’s strangely beautiful.
I finally got to the end of the road, and stopped walking. I remembered something from a book I’d read about a man who asked his friends to say Kaddish for him after he died, and they’d forgotten.
I tried to say it for all of them. I didn’t know how. It’s a Jewish prayer that is said when someone dies, but is less about death than the greatness of their God. I found the English translation of the words on the first page of google and I don’t know if I did it right, but I tried for them.
I kept walking. I kept expecting someone to come yell at me for walking on the grass, but no one did.
I touched the still barbed wire fencing and found that it was cold. I walked past a pile of broken ceramic, smashed into beyond recognizable shapes.
I stumbled on a memorial to the Roma and Sinai people that were killed here. I overheard a group of visitors praying together and singing, and I stopped to listen. I witnessed a military ceremony, young people standing to attention, bearing flags with blue and white stars of David, listening to a woman singing in a language I did not understand.
I began to think that Birkenau has become almost as full of grief and prayer and loving memory as prejudice and cruelty and dying.
That thought was challenged almost as soon as I’d thought of it. Because that was when I walked alone through the building where the initiations of new arrivals in the camp took place.
These people – people who had been taken from their homes and lives, who had just been ripped away from their loved ones – were stripped naked in the cold among strangers. The pregnant women who had escaped the gas chambers in the first selection because their clothing concealed their condition were particularly vulnerable here. They were sterilized and cleaned. Their hair was shaved, regardless of gender. They were tattooed with numbers that replaced their names. They were stripped of their person-hood, in that building. Anne’s hair was shaven off, possibly so quickly and carelessly as to injure her in the process. In that room. I know, because she lived at Auschwitz, because her mother died at Auschwitz, because she and her sister were spared at Auschwitz, only to die in a typhus outbreak at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where their bodies were thrown into a mass grave.
These people’s worlds were ripped apart and thrown unceremoniously into the bottom of a pond, which is still murky with ashes…
I walked out of Birkenau along the railroad ties at sunset. It occurs to me to wonder whether or not it was built by slaves.
It’s not this place that frightens me.
It’s the fact that it came to be.
Otto Frank believed that it is everyone’s responsibility to fight prejudice.
I stepped outside of the death gate. I found my way back to the edge of the woods where I’d called in the Grandfathers and lit the candle for something to focus on and said “thank you. It’s okay to go now. I’m okay,” and blew the candle out.
And I took a piece of chocolate from the bookstore and threw it into the woods, as an offering…
I walked Auschwitz alone. It took me two days to get through it.
When I left off trying to put this story into words, I think I said that I was crying. I didn’t actually stop crying for that entire day, but eventually I was able to breathe again.
The other visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau all wore the same face. When they stepped out into the sunlight from the dusty dark interior of the crematorium, when they trudged up the stairs from the basement of Block 11, the look in their eyes was shocked and haunted, horrified and tired.
A sign at the entrance to the crematorium reads, simply:
“You are about to enter a place where thousands of innocent people were killed. Please behave accordingly.”
And it’s dark in there, so dark…
I walked the paths between the blocks in something like a daze. I stumbled upon the simple wooden gallows, saw the cruel black hook from which they hung. It was a little way back from the path, and many kept their distance, and I don’t know why but I marched right up and stood in front of it. I felt like there was something or someone there who wanted something from me, like street people asking for spare change. And I couldn’t do anything for them.
Auschwitz I is the part of the museum that has been preserved in the condition it was in when it was a fully functional concentration and extermination camp. In some places it has been reconstructed to show what it was like in the early 1940’s.
That place is evil.
I saw the barbed wire fences. I saw the memorial on the death wall, the place where the rebellious were shot. I saw the glass display case full of children’s shoes, piled higher than I am tall.
I read about the persecution of many different peoples – the Roma and Sinai, the Greeks, the Poles. I read about the experiments performed on women and women’s reproductive systems without anesthetic and without their consent.
I read about the underground ways that people were good to each other. The secretaries who managed to alter records and help their families and friends. The nurses who saved sick women from the gas chambers at the last minute.
I read about the ways that people sold each other out. One man lost his freedom in exchange for twenty US dollars.
I read about families being separated from each other at the gates. Men to the left, women and children to the right, and people clinging to each other, and mothers forcing their children to let go, telling them to take care of each other.
I got to a point where I physically could not read any more. The signs are written in capital white letters on smooth black wood, in English, Yiddish and Hebrew. I could pick out the words, the letters, but I could not make them make make sense.
I kept trying. I’d step inside a building, look around me, maybe snap a photo, see a few panels of an exhibit, and need to step outside into the sun again, take big, deep gulps if cleaner air and lean against the walls. Once I turned and thought I saw a figure of a man in the corner of my eye, crouched, grinning at me, even laughing. But when I looked back he had gone.
I walked out.
I’d barely seen a third of Auschwitz I, and I couldn’t do it any more.
I walked in the general direction of Birkenau. I didn’t have any idea when the camps would close. The sun was going down behind the death-gate, when I got there, and a woman behind the counter at the bookstore told me they were closed. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” she told me, not unkindly.
Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that I could.
I spent my walk back to the train station feeling horrible because I hadn’t been able to make it through.
I’d come all this way, and I’d seen so many things, and I’d learned so much, and I’d loved a child and I’d lost her, and I’d traveled for miles and miles to get to a place she was taken before she died, and I hadn’t been able to do it. I felt like I’d failed.
I somehow made it back to my hostel. I talked to Sara and I talked to Cris. They were the people who knew where I’d been, that day. Cris told me that he didn’t think it was disrespectful to the horrors of what happened to say “I see this, and I need to step back and take a breath,” and that trying to look and physically not being able to is not the same thing and never looking at all. Sara told me that I’m not obligated to anything, and pulled a tarot card for me that said I would be enlightened by this experience and that I would be able to separate from this experience soon.
I slept a little. I woke up at 5AM because the Cheese Guy was snoring in the next bunk. I went downstairs.
I made coffee. I remembered meeting an old Italian grandmother in the hostel kitchen who had just gotten back from visiting the camps and was moving in to elsewhere that night. I told her I was going, too, and we shared a moment of sadness. She gave me a coupon for free coffee in a random place in Kraków that she wasn’t going to be able to use.
I wrote a little, and I thought, and looked at bus schedules. And I thought some more.
And yes yep that is a knitted blanket that I am wearing everything else is gross right now
Self care is fucking important.
It is important to take the time to think of myself before going and doing the things that are hard. It is important to sleep and eat vegetables and remember to plug in my phone.
Calling in the Grandfathers helped me today. (I gave them chocolate afterwards.) So did carrying the stones in my pocket/on my lock screen. Washing my hands. Calling my family and connecting with important people. Writing shit down.
It is important to have a plan that includes not asking myself to do unreasonable things.
I do not need to put myself through a 20+ hour bus ride tomorrow or even the next day or ever. I know where I need to go, but I can take my time getting there.
I do not even need to make myself take a train back to Krakow this evening, I can get myself a room right here.
Such small things. Blankets. A toothbrush. Water pressure. Nice towels. Access to internet. Privacy.
The host at this hostel is unbelievably kind. I sat down in the lobby after a 40 minute walk with a backpack full of dirty laundry 🧺 after having spent an entire day mentally preparing to go back to Auschwitz and then riding a bus To Auschwitz with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and then walking alone around the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps and doing all of the emotional and spiritual and mental work necessary to be there and be present and appropriately honor the tragedy and the bullshit that happened there
not to mention walking for approximately 6 hours
and backpacking all over Europe for a month
and this lovely human being comes over to me in the lobby and asks if I need anything and makes me feel welcome and shows me around the hostel and makes sure I’ve got everything I need and Carries My Bag Up The Stairs For Me and is all like “this kitchen is open to all my guests, the kettle’s on, let me know if you need Anything here is my phone number just call oh and here’s the WiFi password” and you don’t find chivalry like this anywhere anymore. I physically could not stop saying thank you.
Gosh, it appears that I needed that.
I just took what felt like the longest shower of my life, I am Putting Off Doing Chores Until Tomorrow, I am listening to my very own music and wearing only the clothing necessary for my own exclusive company which is basically a blanket with some creative knots and Iiii am going to post this all over the internet and I don’t give any shits right now
and nobody here is snoring!!!! unless it’s me, but if that’s the case then shhhh I don’t need to know
nobody else is coming and going and moving around in the dark at 3 in the morning
nobody’s talking on their phone about how much they hate it here
nobody needs Anything from me.*
*if you do, don’t hesitate to ask. Right now I could do almost anything.**
**I still might say no.
And yes. Yeah. It is so important to appreciate the things you have. 💜🍂
As someone very brave frequently says, it is so, so important to be kind to each other.
When I was waiting in line at Auschwitz, I was confused about the best way to visit the museum, and spoke to the person who was in charge of admission. She was helpful; she seemed tired. But when it was time to scan my ticket, I didn’t have my passport out and ready because I didn’t know, and when she said the words “can I see your ID, please,” the expression on her face looked impatient and frustrated and angry and tired.
When I passed through security, I made a mistake and forgot to take my power bank out of my bag, and the alarm went off, and the security officer’s “What are you doing!” was harsh and it stung, especially in that place. I stepped over that threshold and I think I made it a few steps before starting to cry, and it was kind of crying where breathing feels like kicking yourself to the surface for a lungful of air before being pushed back under the surface again.
That night, after dark, when the camps had closed, I was in the town of Oświęcem, the Polish name of the town that Germany dubbed Auschwitz. I didn’t have a bus ticket back to my hostel and I felt so stupid. I asked the woman behind the desk at a souvenir shop for directions to a train station. When I got there, the place was under heavy construction and I couldn’t find the platform or anywhere to buy a ticket. An English couple asked me for directions to the train to Kraków, but I was as lost as they were. So we banded together to look for the train, and found it within about thirty seconds of meeting.
Sometimes in Germany it is possible to travel long distances on public transportation without one’s ticket being checked. This is illegal, but since I knew that train was leaving soon and didn’t know if there was another one coming, I got on the train without a ticket and sort of prayed. This was a mistake.
About halfway to Kraków a woman in black came down the aisle checking tickets. When she came to me, I told her that I didn’t have one. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I was scared. She didn’t speak my language, but she understood what had happened.
She kept her face carefully blank, wrote something down on her device, and then pulled out a credit card machine. 9zł, she told me. I paid. She scolded me in Polish, and then smiled and walked away.
When I got the the train station, I went looking for a restroom. I was so tired. In Europe it’s not uncommon for bathrooms in public places to require and entrance fee, and I didn’t have the right change. A woman who was walking out saw me standing on the wrong side of the gate, reached into her bag, and put the coin in the slot and walked away without a word.
In the cramped, temporary space of my hostel dorm room, one of my roommates snores very loudly and it makes it hard for me to sleep. He, in turn, complained that the boots I have been walking around Europe in for a month and a half smell really, really bad.
Initially, he thought I was hiding some kind of rotting cheese in my locker. And I – yeah. He also assumed I was lying when I was too embarrassed to tell him about my shoes.
The Cheese Guy felt awkward about talking to me alone, because “you know, young people, women” so he asked an Italian guy who was also sharing the space with us for help confronting me about it.
Because of the brokenness of his English and my German, he still didn’t believe me about the cheese even after I broke down and tried to communicate about the shoes and left them outside on the balcony for the night.
The Italian guy immediately understood, and was like “OH, that makes sense, it happens to me too, here, would you like to borrow this stuff I have, it helps…”
When the Cheese Guy finally understood, he was so embarrassed that he could not look me in the eye.
… I gave the Italian guy permission to tell his girlfriend this story because we both agreed that it’ll be funny in retrospect.
I think for a second there I kind of hated the Cheese Guy. Especially at 5AM when his snoring woke me up from a bad dream, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
But it’s too much work.
In the unexpected, awkward, frustrating intimacy of that space, we had to live with each other’s human-ness and faults. Almost like Anne in the Secret Annex, except nothing like that, because both of us had the freedom to leave.
There is a voice in my head that tells me that I don’t have any of my shit together and I am somehow failing at life because of all of the mistakes I made that day. It’s often very loud.
There is another voice in my head – one that usually sounds like my Dad – that says something like “oh, look, another imperfect human. Never seen one of Those before.”
Everyone is doing their best all the time. I made so many mistakes that day, and every day. I’m human. I’m messy and soo flawed. And so is everyone else.
In a world that is capable of containing so much human cruelty and horror and coldness, it is so important to have empathy for other people.
I’m safely back at my hostel, sitting on the window ledge in the bar. It’s warm here, and there’s WiFi, and there’s a gentle yellow glow from the lights hanging from the ceiling. I can hear strains of familiar pop music on the radio that’s playing at the reception desk in the next room, and it’s strangely grounding.
“…she/is something to behold/elegant and bold…”
Soon I will be able to shower, to take off the boots, to sleep. Almost, but not yet.
I’m still wearing the boots I had on when I walked through the crematorium, through the streets of Auschwitz I.
“I’m burning up again, I’m burning up, and I…”
In Jewish tradition, it is traditional and symbolic to wash one’s hands after a funeral.
Here, I can rest my head against the windowpane, and it’s cold. It isn’t late in the evening, but it’s dark on the other side of the glass.
“I never should have told you/I never should have let you see inside/don’t want it troubling your mind/won’t you let it be…”
I can smell coffee brewing, the beads of sweat drying in the yellow scarf I found in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam. I needed to leave, to get away from all the weed. That’s where I found Anne’s diary.
I remember singing top 40 pop songs with my cousin from Germany and a meteorologist from Morocco in the back streets of Amsterdam in the rain. We came from three different places in the world, but we all knew the same melodies, and even some of the words.
“Just give me a reason, just a little bit’s enough, just a second we’re not broken just bent, and we can learn to love again…”
Top 40 pop songs are universal.
I remember talking to Morocco about calculus. I know where I’m at, with calculus, and she did too. She treated me like a little sister, tried to take me under her wing and tell me everything at once about traveling solo, because the beginning of my journey was the ending of hers. She was way better than me at foosball.
I walked her to the train station, and I held the door for her and I carried her bag, and I hugged her and told her to travel safe, and I will never see her again, and that was the best possible way to say goodbye.
“It’s in the stars/it’s been written in the stars of our hearts…”
The bar again. From far away, my real sister tells me about the five senses grounding exercise. “Brings you back to the present.”
I tried it and it worked.
“There’s only us/there’s only this/forget regret/or life is yours to miss…”
She pulled a Tarot card and told me that it said I would be enlightened by this experience and would be able to separate from this experience soon.
Since leaving home, I’ve noticed that I have the best support system in the world.
There’s the cousin who met me at the airport and found room in her heart and her home and her life for me, when I needed a place to land. She feeds me good food, all the time, and gives excellent hugs. And if I ever need somewhere to go back to, I know I can reach out.
At home, social media and I spent a lot of time together, but we weren’t friends. It sucked away my time. Now, Facebook is the cheapest and most efficient way to let everyone know how I’m doing. And it doesn’t matter how many likes I get, it matters that my aunt appreciated a picture that I took of a cemetery, or that my Dad is able to see the beauty that surrounds me right along with me.
Folks from home have been reaching out to me, telling me that what I’m doing is amazing, yada yada, and that’s nice to hear and everything but the thing that gets me is these are my people, and they’re here, and they’re thinking of me, checking in on me, and I needed that so much.
My mother has been periodically asking me for something called a PIES checkin – how are you doing physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. When she asks me that I have to think about it, and often I notice things that are important. She has a habit of messaging me when I’m at my lowest but haven’t told a soul.
I’ve been calling my Dad every few days during his walk in the morning, which is more or less around lunchtime, for me, and because my body still hadn’t adjusted to the time difference, it’s sometimes essentially morning for me too. It is good to hear his voice and hear him say “I love you.”
The pastor at my parent’s church is there if I need to talk about Auschwitz. I hear that they are all praying for me. I can feel them there.
A college English professor – the one I sort of ugly-cried all over at my graduation – is the only other person I know who has ever done anything like this. She says she wishes she could give me a hug, and she loves me. When I get home, we will talk and compare notes, and she will share a poem she wrote after walking Dachau alone.
My aunts are there. All of them. These are the mother-figures-who-aren’t-my-real-mother that I went to for objective advice before leaving, because they’ve known me for my whole life, and I love them, and I know they care for me. Uncles and cousins, too.
The community that I used to sing with in high school, my chorus room people, the people I used to hang out with in practice rooms, the group of shamelessly strange friends who still get together on New Year’s eve and listen to Kanye and Queen and drink sparkling grape juice at midnight and play a game called distraction Mario Cart in which at least half us end up shirtless… they’re gonna be there when I get home, and I miss them, and we send out-of-context memes across the ocean periodically for old-time’s sake.
The families I grew up knowing through homeschooling cooperatives – we used to put on plays we wrote and go sledding down the hills in the city in the winter – tell me in hearts on Instagram that they’re following what I’m doing, that they remember me, like I remember them.
The people that I found in college are there for me. Always. We laugh all the time, and it’s the best, and it is so important.
My sisters are my strongest roots at home. And I miss them.
I have to believe that my cat loves me even though she can’t text. I can close my eyes and picture myself in her room, and she’s there and solid and warm and breathing quietly. And I know.
I’m a young person who thinks it’s important to remember that genocide is wrong.
In Amsterdam, I found a copy of her diary in the train station when I felt anxious and alone and I needed something to read, a physical, tangible book that I could hold in my hands and open and flip through the pages and smell the paper and scribble things in the margins. I needed another world to escape into, and that world was hers.
In Hamburg, I stood at the top of the tower that is most of what remains of the Church of St Nicolai. The rest of it was destroyed by the Allies’ bombs in World War II, as was much of the rest of that city. At the top of that tower, there is a plaque explaining that Germans must remember that those bombings were a justified retaliation to things that Nazi Germany had done first. Things that were unquestionably wrong.
In Potsdam, I saw buildings that were not destroyed in the war. And some of them were older than any man-made thing I’d ever seen, and they were full of stories and personality and life, and they were beautiful.
In Berlin, I walked with children playing in between the rows upon rows of dark monoliths that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The stone floor beneath our feet rolled up and down like waves, and the stones became higher and higher the farther we got from the edge – beginning at waist height, and gradually rising – like water, rising – so slowly we didn’t notice what was happening until it closed above our heads. And yet, the columns and rows of stone were perfectly straight, and so was the space between them, so that no matter how deep inside the maze we found ourselves – ducking in and out from behind the stones, giggling and grinning and crying a little inside – we could always see the way out.
In Prague, I visited the Jewish Museum. I saw a room with walls covered in the names of the dead, written in letters the size of fingerprints. I saw an exhibit of children’s drawings, something that became an important part of their education system in the ghettos – after they were forbidden to attend public schools, and before they were shipped off to concentration camps.
I stood inside of the Old New Synagog, and sat on a wooden bench and leaned my head against a wall that was built before anyone on this side of the ocean knew that America existed. I learned about the intricate nature of Jewish burial rituals, the way that they care for the dying and honor the dead. I walked through the Old Jewish cemetery on All Saint’s day. There was some logistical problem that meant they didn’t have enough space for everyone, so they just started stacking them, twelve layers deep in some places, the crooked tombstones crowded together like teeth, like a dense forest. It looks like it grew.
And I lit a candle and sat for a while, because I’m just kind of like that.
In Krakow, Poland, I went to Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of the city. There are signs in the buildings in Hebrew, and six-pointed stars. I stepped inside the oldest Synagog in Poland, which has become a museum, and learned about Jewish culture and tradition. About their holidays, and festivals, and memories, and rituals. They are intricate and strict and sweet, and practical and solemn. Speaking as an outsider, it seems like these people value things like light and rest and community, and I can totally get behind all of those things. It’s not my identity, but I can stand here and I can learn about and start to honor yours.
Today in Krakow, I visited a memorial in what used to be a ghetto. There is an organization there that works to return the physical things that were stolen from holocaust victims by the Nazi party to their families. “We are looking for relatives of…” followed by a name, a number, who they were, everything we know about what happened to them. Too often, their fates are unknown.
Tomorrow, I am going to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps.
I did not set out on this journey with any intention of doing this. At home, the holocaust was something distant, horrifying, over, far away. But here, on this side of the ocean, everywhere I’ve been there is a reminder, a memorial, a sacred space. Europe is singing a requiem, and I was close enough to hear it.
I’m not sure what’ll happen to me. I am frightened. I’ve seen the pictures – we all did, in like tenth grade, and I left that classroom shaking even back then. Now it is something that’s real. And for a second there I thought I wasn’t going to be able to do this. I’m sure as hell going to be exhausted afterwards.
But I have to go. Because she did, once. And I want to say goodbye.
I got to the last sentence of that book when I was sitting at the kitchen table in an apartment in Berlin.
I was couch-surfing at a friend of Kathrin’s place. He was a friendly giant of a man who spoke enough English to say to me, “any friend of Kathy’s is a friend of mine” in this thick German accent before sneaking away to play first person shooter games in the next room. We coexisted fine.
The days were getting shorter, darker earlier. I’d made my way back to the apartment building through dark and rainy streets. I’d been walking nonstop for most of three days, exploring the many sights that Berlin has to offer on foot. My right knee was starting to hurt, and my dad and big sister told me to take a rest day. I could almost find my way there without the help of a GPS. Almost. I felt tired and lonely and a little sad.
I rang the doorbell a few times before anyone answered. There were folks gathered in the living room, sitting on the floor and doing each other’s hair and make up and lounging around on their phones and laughing. They were my cousin’s friend’s roommates and friends of roommates, and they were having a great time, and they were speaking German.
I can speak roughly enough German to order a cup of coffee, and I can understand just a little more. I’ve been trying to learn since January, and am slowly making progress. But in that moment, for the first time since leaving home, I felt isolated by that language barrier. I’ve gotten soo much better in the past couple of years, but I have always been shy, and not understanding the words made that shyness harder to overcome. I don’t think I’d ever realized how much listening in on conversations in a room of people talking made me feel a part of things. I felt like I was on the other side of an invisible wall, and couldn’t find a way through.
So I hid in the kitchen and I cooked. I had some vegetables and butter and bread from Aldi’s. I wish that I had tried to step inside that circle – I wanted to. But I was tired.
So that’s where I was at when I was sitting there at the kitchen table, escaping into Anne’s diary to get away from my own world for a moment, and that’s the day I was having when read the line “if only there were no other people in the world,” and that was the last thing she’d written in her diary, possibly the last thing she’d written in her short life.
I’d loved Anne, her story, her people. I loved her careful self-reflection and commentary and honesty and spark. I’d been stepping inside those pages in the evenings as one way to distract myself from how far away from home I am. Knowing that she’d been real, knowing that she wasn’t going to make it, only made that book more important to me. And then she was gone.
There were a lot of people in the apartment who didn’t know my name or where I was from or who I was, so I sort of hid in the bathroom until I could stop crying.
That same day I’d visited the Berlin Wall. I’d watched children playing between the rows and rows of dark monoliths that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I’d rested my chin on my arms on a stone ledge and peered into the tiny screen that is all Berlin has as a memorial to the gay folks that were persecuted under the same regime. “You are steeping yourself in the Holocaust. Be careful” my dad told me in a text. My sister recommended getting some kind of sage action for myself.
I read Night by Eli Wiesel that night. It’s a harrowing experience, “a slim volume of terrifying power,” and I didn’t mean to do that to myself on top of everything else, but something inside of me wanted to. I read it in one go, like drinking an entire bottle in one swallow. It was the only way that I could.
When I got to the end, I put it down. I felt years older and hollowed out and horrified and sad and my eyes were red and puffy and my head hurt.
There’s an ounce of self preservation inside of me that kicks in at moments like these. I put the book down. I took a shower. I brushed my teeth (I think I left that toothbrush there by accident, because when I got to the next city it was missing.) I made some tea. A couple of people from home reached out to me that night – people who usually make me laugh and smile and feel centered and connected to home – and I didn’t have the energy to write back much. I tried to communicate how I was doing, and just said that I needed to shift focus to self care things for a while.
I felt spiritually whooped.
When it gets too heavy, it’s okay to set it down for a while. It will be there if you want to pick it back up later. And it you don’t, that’s okay, too.
The next day, I got kicked out a coffee shop by a cranky German lady for not having enough cash for the coffee I had ordered, although she grudgingly gave it to me for free. On my way to the station, this older, homeless looking black guy smiled at me and asked if he could have a sip of the coffee. I gave him the whole thing. He grinned at me over his shoulder as we walked away, and called out a “you look good. I love you,” and I smiled.
I said goodbye and thank you to Kathrin’s friend. He gave me a hug and said “always again.” His girlfriend smiled at me, a little awkwardly, and waved goodbye.
On the bus out of Berlin, I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. I also got myself a lot of chocolate and proceeded to eat all of it. The sun was shining. The city was beautiful. The world was still turning.
“Oh, you know. When you’re up someplace high, and you want to jump for no good reason.”
A flash of understanding.
“Or like when you’re standing on a sidewalk and get that urge to step out into oncoming traffic?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Can’t remember.”
“I know there’s a word for it. Call of the – something.”
“Call of the abyss!”
“That’s the one.”
We were looking down over the edge of a bridge in the old warehouse district in Hamburg, Germany. The three of us together represented three different nationalities – Denmark, Finland, and the United States. We’d met in a twelve-person dorm at the youth hostel. It went like this:
“Where you from?”
“New York.”
“Nice city.”
“Actually I’m not – well, yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“Big.”
“Yeah. Where you from?”
“Denmark. ‘s beautiful there. What brings you here?”
“I-was-studying-and-I-needed-a-break.”
“That’s fair. What were you studying?”
“Math.”
“Come again?”
“Mathematics. I loved it, but I felt tired.”
“I don’t blame you. I never got the hang of numbers.”
We talked about gap years and the United States education system. (She asked.) The woman from Denmark dressed in black, and liked blues music, and, recently, photographing insects. She and another woman from Finland were going to look at cathedrals, and would I like to join them? Everyone else was going on a walking tour.
“Never liked walking tours,” she said. “I’m a bit independent. I like to do things in my own time.”
And so we went.
The warehouse district in Hamburg is made up of old brick buildings built along a canal system, designed for the transportation and storage of goods. Some of them still serve their original purpose, housing spices and carpets and coffee from around the world. Hamburg is a harbor city.
The space itself isn’t pretty in the way that cathedrals are pretty. It’s beautiful, in the way that only brick walls and intricate masonry and bridges over dull brown water under a grey sky can be.
We found a set of old stone steps along the side of the canal, covered in muck and slime and algae, that allowed access down to the water’s edge. Murky water lapped at the bottom steps. The stairs were sealed off from the rest of the word by a single chain between two posts.
Denmark caught me staring, looked around to make sure no one was looking, and unclipped the chain.
“You know you want to.”
And I did.
I did not slip and fall. The steps were narrow, there was no railing between the water and me. The stairs went down further than I’d expected – the last few steps of the staircase were underwater. It was quieter down there. Surreal.
Denmark smiled down at me.
I shook my head, and grinned, and made my way back up into the world.
Denmark had to leave to catch a train – she was meeting up with a friend that she met in a video game. Finland and I exchanged numbers and parted ways. We’d planned to meet up later to go on a boat tour at night – but I got lost, and my phone died, and I almost crashed an electric scooter trying to find my way to the docks, and I accidentally got on the wrong boat, and by the time I got back to the hostel that night I was soaked through with rain and cold and grinning like an idiot because there was good news from home that night and I’d finally figured out how bus schedules worked.
That was the hostel that I walked to at four in the morning, because I’d taken an overnight bus from Holland…
On my second night there, a backpacker from Canada made cookies, despite the lack of measuring spoons in the hostel kitchen. She just kind of improvised, and they came out sweet and warm and exactly what I needed in that moment. I was sitting nearest at the table when she brought them out.
“Would you like a cookie?
Everyone in the room flocked to them, the way that seagulls converge on a scrap of bread in a parking lot.
We sat at that table, and we started asking each other questions. “Where you from? What brings you here?” It went on like that. There were people from all over the place. Finland and Denmark were there, plus Ukraine, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Canada. The states. Hi, hello, that’s me. Amsterdam had checked in after hours and was trying to get away with staying there for free by sleeping in the loft. His dream is to start a business that will make the world better, but he doesn’t know what it will be yet.
The next night, the whole lot of us sat barefoot on the floor and talked. About the boarders between countries, and shadows, and the luck of the Irish, and marriage, and drugs, and ghosts, and on and on until 2AM when the last of us went to sleep…
I remember trying to explain to a room full of people why some infinities are bigger than other infinities. They listened. Canada got it, for a moment. I could feel it – her breathing changed. And then we both lost it again.
Hamburg was the first city I ever navigated on my own. I found my way there, I found a place to sleep, I found food, I found people, and memories, and beautiful things to do and see and explore. I did all of those things by myself, but I also wasn’t alone, and I will remember…
When I tell people I’m from New York, everyone thinks of the city.
I’m not from the city. I’ve never been.
I’m from a small town in the middle of a cornfield that’s a little bit south of a different city that sits on the edge of a relatively large lake, and that lake is the only thing, geographically speaking, that is between us and Canada. Personally, I’ve always liked the smaller lakes, the ones that are named for the way that they look like the fingers of a hand.
I keep trying to explain this place to people I meet on the road. It’s hard to put home into words.
I have very deep roots, there. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d hardly ever visited anywhere else in my life – a few places, here and there, but rarely.
My mother remembers that I fully intended to never leave home, to stay in my childhood house and take care of my parents until – well, forever. It’s an old, rambling country farm house on the top of the hill, surrounded by miles of corn fields and soy beans and purple clover.
I love that house. It is perpetually cluttered – entire rooms and drawers and cupboards are filled with stuff that only ever sits there accumulating dust. The living room has south-facing windows to let the light in, and a threadbare couch, and a big black dog. The kitchen smells like coffee in the mornings, and sounds like National Public Radio.
Since my little sister and I have been old enough to have separate rooms, I’ve slept in the attic, with a cat who hates everyone but me. The stairs from the upstairs to the downstairs are painted pink. The kitchen floor has a peeling, checkered pattern of squares that I can almost see if I can close my eyes.
Outside, there are overgrown gardens and fruit trees and pines and a wooden swing and a treehouse and a trampoline, and an Austrian pine tree several stories taller than the house and so big around that my little sister and I together still can’t get our arms around it. In the winter there used to be these drifts of snow as tall as me, and we would dig tunnels through them – my little sister and I, and then go inside for the hot chocolate that we used to make on the stove.
I never wanted to grow up, back then. I never wanted to leave…
There’s a bittersweet saying that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
But it isn’t gone. It’s still there. I dream about it all the time. I have been afraid of leaving all my life, and now I am thousands of miles away, and it’s still a part of me.
It will always be a part of me.
And it’s strange, but now that I have left, I am full of a feeling of not being ready to go home yet. I keep having dreams where I wake up at home before I meant to come back, and I miss Europe, I didn’t get to say goodbye to Europe, to this backpacking lifestyle I’ve found, and I want to go back…
And so I’m beginning to think that this will always be a part of me, too.
My mother always grows too much zucchini in the summer.
She’s not alone. There are small towns in the north-eastern part of America where people only lock their cars at night during zucchini season, for fear of opening them in the morning to find a small mountain of zucchini in the backseat. People are that desperate to get rid of them. For some reason, this is something that happens every summer without fail, as if no one remembers what’s inevitably going to happen from the previous year. Maybe it’s similar to the way that women forget the pain of childbirth.
And folks get so very creative with finding uses for the darned things. One of the better ones is zucchini bread, which is more of a loaf-shaped cake than anything else. It’s yellow and sweet with green flecks throughout, best served cold with cream cheese or grilled in butter on the stove.
Somehow my mother convinced me to take some zucchini bread with me, on the plane, in my carry on. For my cousin. I’d already flatly refused to bring a box of pears from the tree in the side yard, just on general principles. I didn’t want to carry them.
But she had stayed up until 5AM baking them on one of the last nights before I left, and it really was an excellent batch, and I imagined that if I somehow survived a plane crash on a deserted island, at least I would have zucchini bread from home. So I agreed.
Flash forward several hours later, and I am trying to pass through security at the Boston airport. It’s always a little scary, letting go of my stuff. I’m standing there on the safe side of the TSA checkpoint, barefoot in my socks, clutching my jacket and shoulder bag under one arm and my boots in the other, and I hear the alarm go off. My backpack has not made it through the checkpoint. At this point, I am getting worried.
And officer beckons me over.
“Is this your bag?”
I nod, frozen.
“Okay,” he says, smugly, walks away. I hear him say something to his buddies about going to get lunch.
Shit.
Was there something I missed? Are they going to take me away for questioning? I hadn’t done anything Wrong, I’d double and triple checked everything the night before…
After a few minutes that felt like forever, another TSA officer, a big, dark-skinned woman with her hair tied back in a ponytail, came to my rescue. She unzipped my backpack, lifted out the paper bag containing my mother’s zucchini bread, and gingerly opened the bag as though it was going to explode.
It was so dense that it has showed up as suspicious looking on the scan.
“Bread,” she said, flatly.
I nodded again, tried to smile. I probably failed.
She returned the zucchini bread to the backpack, zipped the backpack shut, handed it to me, and turned away.
Shaking a little, I carried my stuff to a bench somewhere as far away as possible and put my shoes back on.
What I eventually came to think of as “that f***ing zucchini bread” is the reason they stopped me at every TSA checkpoint from America to Germany. It arrived at my cousin’s apartment a little squashed, the paper bag rumpled. We shared it with her roommates, all of whom liked the story just as much as they liked the cake.
It was early in the morning, and still dark out. I’d taken the compost out to the pile in the back yard, and my boots were wet from the dew in the grass. My dad joked that the compost bin was going to be full to bursting when I got home.
I’d also stopped at Jewel’s grave and said a goodbye and an I love you.
I piled into the back of my dad’s bright red midlife-crisis SUV, with my backpack balanced on the seat beside me. Everything I was taking with me was inside that backpack. No way in hell was I letting it out of my sight for that entire journey.
My parents sat in the front seat. Dad was driving. The sky was getting lighter as we took the expressway north into the city. My stomach was fluttering and my hands shook a little. I was knitting. Tying off the last row of something large and blue that covered my lap, something that had started out as a sweater but hadn’t ended up as one. I hadn’t touched the thing in ages, but the night before I had realized I was ready. I had started it at around the same time that I had decided I wanted to go to Germany, and now, through a strange combination of events, I was going. It was time.
We stood at that gate for a long time, my mom and my dad and I. Three of us in a group hug, and we none of us was about to let go.
As we pulled away, my dad remembered something important. He pulled out his phone, opened his compass app, and turned to face the east. Then he grabbed my hand and centered himself for a moment.
We’re not a religious family, but my parents are both spiritual people. My mother, for example, focused her energy on creating a bubble of white light around the plane for the whole time it was in the air, and I know she was doing that without having to ask.
My dad only calls in the Grandfathers at times when he believes we need them, and this was one of those times.
He turns to face each of the directions in turn, and summons them. It’s a simple prayer, with a different meaning and imagery and kind of support associated with each direction.
“Grandfathers of the east, the direction of new beginnings…” he began, and he asked them to be with me and support me on my journey.
I will never remember all of the words.
“…the animal of this direction of the song sparrow, singing in the new day,” he concluded, and his voice broke just a little. We both started to cry. And then we faced the south, and asked for strength. The west for intelligence. The north for wisdom. And so on.
Until it was over, and it was time. I pulled away because if I didn’t do it then I wasn’t going to be able to. And I made it through security. There was almost no line.
I waved goodbye to them, through the glass. I was crying. They were crying. You are crying. We are all crying. And that was okay.
My parents have a vague idea of what country I’m in, most of the time.
The story that I tell people is that I was studying for a while and then I got tired and needed a break, so I ran away from home.
I’m traveling solo around Europe, taking buses and trains from hostel to hostel, staying with strangers, living out of a single backpack, learning how to order coffee in languages I don’t understand.
Right now, I’m in Poland. About a week ago, I wasn’t. About a week ago, I had no idea that I would be going to Poland. About a week from now, I probably won’t be in Poland. But I’m not entirely sure.
I don’t have a plan. I can wake up in the morning and decide where I want to go, what I want to do, how I want to get there. I don’t have to answer to anyone.* And for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling something very close to free.
*Except for my little sister, who wants me back home by Thanksgiving.
I like being able to make mistakes with nobody watching. Which makes it hard when a stranger yells at me in German for biking on the wrong side of the street, or in Polish for walking in the wrong grass in courtyard of a castle, or in Czech for looking at my phone and not watching where I’m going and almost bumping into them. But it’s just a lesson, even if it stings just a little, and I learn.
Traveling is an education in how to operate in this world. How to wash your dishes after cooking, and clean up the kitchen for the next person. What to do if you get on the wrong train. How to ask for help from strangers. How to cope when you get lost in a strange place when your phone is dead and the street signs are written in somebody else’s language and you are completely by yourself. How to worry a little for other people, when you’re sleeping in a room with eight or ten bunks and it’s 8AM and you’re the first one up and the floor creaks like something else, but your mouth feels like something died in there are you desperately want a toothbrush and a toilet and a sink.
Self care becomes a necessity, not an option. For me.
Like, look. You’ve got to sleep, because you’re going to need the energy for tomorrow. You need to eat good food, or your belly will be uncomfortable. You need that fuel so you can walk, so you can think. Same goes for water.
This is why, every time I land somewhere new, I immediately hit up a grocery store. I didn’t plan on this. It was a rhythm I fell into without thinking. It’s like a game, learning to navigate a new currency and a new language, where the end goal is a bar of chocolate and some onions/peppers/mushrooms/something that is hopefully butter, it looks like it’s probably butter, we’re going with that.
The basics. Where are you going to sleep for the next three nights? How are you getting there? Where does the bus leave from? Where is the free WiFi so that you can find out/make sure of all those things?
I’ve memorized my credit card number, my social, my passport ID.
You learn how to trust people, and how to be careful. Triple checking that you’ve got your passport and your debit card and your keys and charger and phone, on you person or somewhere safe. But at some point, you leave your backpack somewhere unattended in a dorm for a couple of minutes and you just sort of pray that no one will steal anything on the inside of it, and you know they won’t because it’s just clothes and deodorant and shampoo and a toothbrush and the tulips you bought for your mother in Holland anyway, and they all brought their own and are all secretly hoping the same thing about their own stuff.
When you are carrying everything you need with you in a backpack, you very quickly learn exactly what you actually need. And over time, the things you don’t need phase out to make room for the things you do need, but didn’t realize you were going to, when you start to wish you had them.
I don’t need more than like two pairs of pants, but a pair of flip flops for questionable bathroom floors at some of the hostels would be lovely.
It isn’t all about the sightseeing, or where I go, or even the history and culture that surrounds me, even though those things are educational and awe inspiring in their own rite. For me, I think I am traveling alone because of what this lifestyle does for me on a personal level. There’s something new and challenging and frustrating and scary and sad and beautiful around every corner. It’s pushing me outside my comfort zone, requiring me to grow, and I am constantly seeking out the things that do that for me.
