I can't believe that it's now been a year since I came back from Chile! I have successfully completed all three years of my exchange. The applying year, the actually away year, and the coming back year. So now I am supposed to move on. -? I still have the urge to cling to my exchange self, my life, my stories, my experiences. This year it felt ok to be moving on and making new friends and settling back in because that is what one is supposed to do. I was just trying to survive reverse culture shock. But now, I am officially freed from all of the duties of being an exchange student. I am just another teenager, and my exchange is a distant memory.
However, when I look at pictures from my exchange, or eat avocado, or see a math problem on my SAT that I learned how to solve in Chile, it all comes flooding back to me and I just want to go back in time and re-live that year over, and over again. Like Groundhogs Day. :) Que rico.
But instead, I usually just begin to tell some story that is totally irrelevant to everyone else, and they smile at me as if sarcastically showing their interest. And so the logical Willow slaps the over-excited Willow on the hand, and I return to reality and move forward.
Sometimes I really do wish I could go back. Not just back to Chile, because my Laura wouldn't be there, and my host family wouldn't be in Temuco anyway. I want to go back to my year. When it felt like in June the world would explode, and every new day was a challenge for my ambassador self. But, how boring would that be? To go back? I already did that. I have a new chapter of my life to explore, new challenges to scale, new lessons to breach. I will soon be an adult and go off to college to live on my own for the rest of my life, not just a year.
So, I think of that and push on. I push on and I begin the next chapter of my saga. The applying year, the four away years, and then when the world will explode in June.
