Heißen Sie willkommen nach Deutschland!

To my audience:

I know you have all been worried sick about me, wondering if I ever did get a hold of STA Travel’s Customer Service and found a replacement flight.

Well, you can relax, because I have made it home safely, but I wouldn’t be too disappointed if you felt a bit sorry for me because my new travel accommodations were extremely worse than my old ones.

My original flight was supposed to leave at 11 a.m. from Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, land in Philadelphia 8 or so hours later, from which I was to take a second plane that would land in Seattle 5 hours after takeoff. So the original trip would have taken around 18 hours altogether including driving to and from airports and waiting at the airports in between. That was bad enough. The replacement plan was much worse. I had to fly from Stockholm at 6:30 a.m., land in Frankfurt, Germany and wait there for 4 hours, then take another plan to Philadelphia, where I waited for an hour and a half, and then get on a third plane that took me to Seattle where I waited for an hour for my friends to pick me up. The overall trip was almost 29 hours long. It absolutely sucked. I would never wish this situation on anyone ever.

How do I figure? Well, you know how I love to lay out the details, so hang on tight because I am going to recap the whole thing to you.

My last night in Sweden was awful. Marcus and I slept on the sofa in his parents’ house because all the beds were occupied. I had a very hard time falling asleep for many reasons. 1) I was very upset that I was leaving very soon and didn’t want to waste my last few hours in Sweden sleeping. 2) My back was hurting very bad from sleeping on horrible surfaces and sofas are not the best for supporting back issues. 3) The sofa was too small and I was hanging off the edge. The point is, I had a terrible shallow sleep that lasted three hours if that, so I was the opposite of well rested when I embarked on my return home.

Marcus’ father woke us up at 4 a.m., and we were on the road at 4:30. That is when I start the timer. We arrived at the airport at 5. I was feeling sick from my lack of sleep, the dread of the journey, and reluctance to say goodbye to my best friend.

Marcus stood with me in line and made sure I understood my travel instructions and got my bag checked in okay. I felt really numb at this point, mostly because I was too exhausted to think straight, and everything just felt like a bad dream. Marcus was very groggy and delirious as well, and I feel like our goodbye was very bland. I feel like it should have been much more dramatic and emotional, but it wasn’t. It was “Bye, I love you, see you someday in the future”. Then he was gone. The instant he was out of sight, reality hit me like a wrecking ball and it was as if my eyes were dams that exploded, and the lakes they held crashed into the land around them. I didn’t have the capacity in my mind to deal with the pain I felt then, and I didn’t care that I probably looked like a fool standing all alone in an airport with streams of liquid anguish pouring down my cheeks. After all the goodbyes I had said throughout the last few days of my stay in Sweden, I realized that this was the final goodbye. The boring, insignificant goodbye that marked the end of a momentous time in my life.

I had a middle seat on the first plane. I sat in between two elderly gentlemen that didn’t even glace my way. It was a miserable couple of hours. I tried my best to sleep, but I am not very good at getting comfortable when in a sitting position.

Upon landing in Germany, I had four hours to waste before I could check into my gate to board the second flight. The Frankfurt airport was a royal pain in the behind to find my way around. The security check points were absolutely anal and there were many of them. It was way worse than the American airports. I became very good about pulling my belt off and ripping my laptop out of my backpack, though. Not something I really wanted to invest time into getting good at, but I didn’t really have a choice in this matter. I spent at least an hour finding my gate. I had to climb stairs and take a sky train to a separate terminal and climb down stairs and go through several security checkpoints before I made it to my gate. I arrived to my gate too early though and I was not allowed to go sit in the gate area until it was my official boarding time. That was annoying. I was very tired and grumpy, and all I wanted was to curl up in a ball on the floor and sleep.

So then I had about three hours to waste. I had my laptop with me, but it only had 12% battery life remaining. I had a European plug for my laptop, and so I searched the airport for an outlet, and I found two. Both of them were in use. So I walked in circles for a while, sat in a chair and listened to music, and wrote in my notebook. I was generally unhappy about all of it.

I was so happy to get on that second plane where I knew that at least I could relax and have a blanket for at least a little over eight hours. This was the least horrible out of the three flights. I attempted to position myself in a semi-comfortable fashion so I could nap a bit. I achieved something tolerable and took a nap. I woke up with a trail of crusty drool down the side of my face and a wet spot on the pillow I had my head on. My nose was stuffy and my throat hurt.

I managed to stir up a little small talk with the man sitting next to me on this flight. He was polite, and I was glad about that. I feel like unsocial and rude people are abundant on planes for some reason. He was actually interested to talk to. He told me that he is in the U.S. military and he drove trucks down in Iraq. He lives in Germany now with his Romanian wife and two very small sons. The conversation stayed fairly shallow until towards the end of the flight. The flight attendants passed out U.S. Customs documents that needed to be filled out, and I glanced over at his and noticed that his last name was “Riddick”. I pointed and said quite loudly, “No way!” He laughed and said he got that reaction a lot. After that, we fired up our personalities and started talking like we were old friends catching up. I learned a lot about Mr. Riddick. He likes peanut butter on his pancakes and his wife has tons of shoes that she stores in suitcases. He was really excited to eat American pizza because he hates the way Europeans make their pizza. He is from North Carolina and was on his way back to visit there.

It was nice to have someone to talk to. Someone like me does not do well keeping quiet for too long. It was also very nice to have someone to talk to while going through the annoying procedure of re-entering the United States and having to go through U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and having to re-check in all the luggage and have to go through the whole airport security crap for the millionth time.

Once I was in the U.S., something switched in my brain and I could feel that I was no longer in Europe, not only geographically, but also mentally. I hated that. The last flight was the worst. I wanted nothing more than to be held like a child and comforted because I felt so lonely and so lost.

I sat in a row of three seats on this plane, the seat in the middle was empty, I sat next the aisle, and a man sat next to the window. It was nice to have the middle seat empty so I could lean over and try to situate myself in a little more comfortable way than the previous positions I had tried. This is the flight where all my emotions came crashing down on me. I had my headphones on and I began to write things in my notebook. This is what was written:

Time is a demon
Impossible to out run
Every minute is a bullet
Every mile is a gun
The growing distance is the trigger
This plane a shaking finger
As the space between grows bigger
The deepest sadness lingers

Place I love left behind
To return to my
Reoccurring nightmares
When asked, I denied
When denied, I lied

I attached my heartstrings
To where we slept
As the plane flies, I am unraveling
Hold tight to the piece of your heart I’ve always kept

And also…

The moment you were out of sight, I caved in. Everything became blurry. How will I sleep tonight, how will I live? All this time spent piecing myself together, just to fall apart. Is it possible to rebuild a broken heart? Sweet country of my destiny, reveal yourself to me. I don’t want to remain hollow. Will fate ever intervene? The reality now is like poison and I will not swallow, but you don’t speak the same language emotionally as me and you don’t get what I mean. Perhaps I am much too foreign and you will never comprehend what it means when I walk your streets and sail your seas. What I mean when I sleep in your beds and hold your hands and press my body against your land. What I say when I sing on your stages and what I hear when I listen to your bands. What I feel when I dance on your floors and sit on your shores. I can never be satisfied, I’ll always need more. Wait for me, Sweden. I’m coming back to you. It won’t be long till then. Please stay true.

Landing in Seattle was relieving in a way because I knew that my aloneness would be extinguished by the friends that were meeting me there, and I was not disappointed. I encountered a pretty girl named Brianna running toward me like a crazy person, and I welcomed the sight with open arms. Not but a few feet behind her were my friends Paul and Grant. I was home at last.

It’s been a few days now, and so much has happened since my return. As much as I am glad to be home and in the arms of so many people that I love that love me here, I have left half of my heart in some little country across the ocean. It is ever so inconvenient to try to function as half a person, but for the time being, there is nothing I can do.

Hello, America. It’s been a while. Farewell, dear Sweden. I love you deeply and will return one day.

Already I have so many exciting things to document about my first days home, but that is material for another blog at another time.

I am ending this entry with suspense in the air. Be excited. Because I am exciting. .