Midnight Thoughts as I Near the End

I got a little teary and sad today about leaving Sydney. I went to cancel my gym membership at the pool and it just felt so final. I loved going there. I’ve spent soooo many days in that beautiful park just passing time, back-stoking across the pool and staring up at an endlessly blue sky. It felt wrong to be saying goodbye.

I keep finding myself wondering if this will be the last time I ever visit our grocery store, the convenience store in our building run by the nicest Chinese woman and her adorable daughter, the last time I’ll get gelato from Cow & Moon, or the last bus ticket I will ever buy here. None of these things are extraordinarily awesome or anything, they’ve just been my small comforts in times when I would have done anything to feel human again. I’m not sure if I can explain it well. I know in my mind that they are small things to miss but I know in my heart that the small things have sustained me and that imagining a world without even these very small pleasures scares me. I know there will be bigger and better pleasures where we are going but still I’m a bit afraid.

I’m sure none of my friends would believe me if I told them that—that I still feel a little bit of fear when I embark on a new journey. Sometimes traveling is easy but saying goodbye rarely is. Even when I left my small Korean town last time in 2008, I was a bit weepy despite having hated it for nearly 6 months. The truth is that no matter where we are, the human spirit compels us to make a home—to have a community, familiarity, comforts and sanctuary. However insufficient life here has been, I’ve still had a home here and I’m abandoning it, no doubt in search of another one, but abandoning it all the same. 

I named this blog Twenty First Century Nomad when I first started blogging; it's sort of a name I adopted for myself while I was still in college and dreaming of traveling forever. I grew up with a very warped and transient idea of home which in many ways has made me feel like I have no home at all. But I realize now, after a lot of traveling and life experience, that nomads are nothing like what my 21 yr old self thought they were.

Nomads are not “homeless” people but rather people with many homes. They are not gypsies, ever in motion and never returning to their roots. Real nomadic people like Kyrgyz and Mongols actually have several “homes” that they return to every year at different times, shuffling their herds around to the best grasslands at the best times of the year across vast expanses of land. They return to familiar places. Their children return to play in the same creek beds as the year before, fall out of the same trees, climb on the same rocks, eat the same roots, swim in the same lakes… They are not homeless people, people with no sense of home, or even people with no desire to stay put. On the contrary, they are people with a very deep rooted sense of belonging to the land and their surrounds, their hunting grounds, the traditions, the seasons, the places, the memories.

My idea of what a nomad was back in my early years of travel was very naive and romanticized. Back then, I didn’t really understand the concept of “home” or what it means to belong somewhere. I didn’t think I ever would. And yet, even in the hardest of environments (Sydney), I’ve made a home. It was in part a conscious effort but also in part a surprise because I never expected that I would feel the emotions I felt today. I never thought I would miss this place. I never thought I loved this place in any way despite so many efforts to. But I do. I don’t love the whole of it but I love pieces of it and it’s the culmination of those pieces that makes me realize leaving here means I really will be missing out on something.

When Jeremy got home from work I had a bit of cry with him because I felt so sad to be leaving without having found the “home” I expected. I came here with pretty high hopes of loving this place and becoming Australian one day but situations overcame us and I couldn’t make it—I couldn’t mold what I had into what I wanted. Call it money problems or call it people problems; the short of it is that it just didn’t work. And I feel bad because there is so much I wanted to see and so much I wanted to do, because I really do believe in the cliched Australia, that somewhere out there is a small town where everyone wants to be your friend and invite you to barbecues on the beach. I lamented to him that I fear this place would never be my home again, that I would always return as a visitor and only as a visitor, that I will never have that chance to find the life I wanted to have here.

I know that all sounds so existential but it’s what I feel and in someways it’s what I know. I know that somewhere in my heart my dreams have been burned. I know that even if I ever tried it again here, I would still have pain and I may never get beyond it. So leaving here really is a bit existential—it’s the end. There is no return. I’m not going to find that dream. I may return as a polite observer of the natural wonders this country has to offer but I will never own them as my own, and that makes me sad. I’m leaving my home. I’m really leaving my home. I’m returning to another home (Korea) but I’m well and truly leaving this one. I won’t return next season to play in the same creek beds as the year before, fall out of the same trees, climb on the same rocks, eat the same roots, swim in the same lakes…

In leaving here I am both breaking with my nomad tradition and also keeping it.

In many ways I’m tired of traveling. I miss my original home—my country, the United States. I haven’t touched soil there since August 2007 and I miss it so much. The smell of evergreen trees, the really random kindness of strangers, going to baseball games, watching the super bowl (mind you, I don’t really care about sports), eating barbecue ribs and listening to my uncle play the harmonica. I miss everyday life. We’re heading back to Korea for what I think will be two years and I know that’s all it’ll be, but it feels like too much sometimes. My heart keeps telling me it’s time to return to my traditional home, to the grasslands of my youth, where my clan is waiting for me.

I hope that one day I’ll make it back to the home I miss most.