Best Wishes

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” After weeks of cursing the ocean in every language I have access to, I now approach it warily. There is some sadness in my heart. I was finally hugged, by several people that almost reached my shoulders in height. The hug of a child, while warming and lovely, does not fill the lonely hole in my core. It certainly does not feed me nor teach me how to teach them. I will cherish their goodbye cards forever but I'm still peacin' out.

People here just don't hug. Not adults; it must be something they cast off like a caterpillar casts off it's chrysalis to become the butterfly. Part of me is wondering if folks are just starting to warm up to me, if I waited too long. Part of me thinks that I have undergone metamorphosis. What butterfly am I? I am a leaving person. I have changed in status. I have become someone you can tell things, things you need to share but want an ocean between them and you after they are spake. A leaving person is someone you can forget consequences with (though sadly not sexual orientation...or at least not for me).

With a full belly from my going away party I wonder if I am mistaken. I've maintained that they are nice people this whole time, maybe it is just not in their nature to be really helpful unless they absolutely have to. Our governments are our parents, they teach us how to behave. My stomach wouldn't have been full if I had stayed. My tutor, these teachers wouldn't have cared more as the days passed and loneliness killed me at night when even the exhaustion of my illegal and solitary leadership in the classroom couldn't make me sleep.

So as I hug the little ones and even contemplate feeling feelings at our separation, I keep looking at them and wishing they were Jews, or that these people I'm drinking with were people from back home. Where is the line between culture shock, homesickness, and a mistake? Life is gray, very gray.

Am I mistaken again? I don't think so. Even as the manic fear faded to routine this path grated on me and the pull home remained strong. The fact that without training, or food, or sleep and wading through lies (my own and others), I have made such a strong impression-and a good one, I hope means that I represented my country well. My doubts now are built on fear as much as those that turned my path around were. There's a light at the end of the tunnel this way though. A dark, winter, snowy, unemployed light.

I'll never know if I left too early (I suspect sometimes that coming here at all was too early), if I didn't give it enough time. If their kindness was born of actual affection or of my change in status; I suspect a combination of both. So I will try not to let these smiles and frowns and well wishes and finally eating taint my return but maybe part of Spain is trying to apologize. Maybe Spain as a whole would like to part on better terms. Fine then España and your Galicia, I agree to accept your half-assed apology and will do my best to try and portray you as ambiguously as possible: to cite a kindness every time I curse a fault. Let us never meet this way again. I wish you the best and hopefully we can both improve and in the horrible circumstance that we cross paths again, our civility will be more amicable. Adiós.