Yesterday

Yesterday was the last day of my so-called “not quite a summer vacation” because today I returned back to work in the Language Resource Center at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I felt a little like Cinderella when my alarm went off this morning because there would be no five-minute walk to Starbucks for coffee and croissants for I was no longer a jet-setting, international student flitting about in London. Instead of three flatmates and four different morning routines there was only one routine, my routine, which consisted of a dog to be walked and clothes to be ironed. While those chores may not seem too appealing, there were also good things to be had: a definite hot shower, complete with water pressure and a Dunkin Donuts drive-thru for coffee and a muffin.

On Friday it seemed unfathomable to me on that Thursday, I woke up in London and went to sleep in Charlotte. Even more unfathomable to me on Friday morning was that I shared my bed with Blue, my dog, who before my departure was not allowed to sit, let alone sleep on the furniture.

While waiting for my luggage to make it’s appearance on the carousel on Thursday afternoon, a noticed a boy who was about ten-years-old standing with two flight attendants waiting for an otherwise nondescript black suitcase to appear. Michael had also taken U.S. Airways flight 733 as an unaccompanied minor. And though his bag was nowhere in sight, he was as cool as a cucumber with the steel resolve of a man three or four times his age. Even when one of the flight attendants grew impatient with the child and his phantom luggage he remained calm and did not even flinch when she abandoned the effort to locate his bag.

I admired the young traveler because hours earlier I had been a nervous wreck about taking the flight back home and here he was seemingly unfazed by the Transatlantic journey and potentially lost luggage. As my bag finally made its way around the carousel, I told myself that I would be as confident as he the next time I took a flight.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when an airport official asked if I needed directions to a connecting flight to which I replied, “nope, I live here, I’m home.” It felt good to be home! I could not have been happier than when my best friend picked me up, but I was a little disappointed when she said, “I talked to you everyday so it doesn’t even seem like you’ve been gone for three weeks!” And she was right, I felt a little silly recounting the details of my experience since she had been getting daily updates all along. Later that evening and for the rest of the weekend, there was a constant barrage of, “How was your trip?” “Did you see the queen?” “Did you ride double-decker buses?” and so forth from family and friends. Each time I answered, I smiled as I remembered some my flatmates, classmates, and even Elvis. Three weeks went by in a flash. It was a blur, really, and I do not know how to do the experience justice by way of description without rambling on and on and possibly annoying my captive audiences.

The one thing that I have not been able to convey was the overall awesomeness of the entire experience, cold showers and all. As cliché as it sounds, there are just no words to sum up three weeks of doing, seeing, and experiencing things that I had never imagined.

Sitting in the theater with Kathryn seeing Wicked on our last night, I felt like “Defying Gravity” was my anthem. Maybe the next time someone asks me about my trip I’ll tell them that defying gravity is exactly what it felt like especially since that's probably as close as I will ever get to an accurate descriptor.