Going back home.

Before I enter a new phase, which I have been advised will be “the three most miserable years” of my life, I have made some very exciting plans to visit Albania this summer-the country where I was born and raised. Where do I begin to explain to you how overjoyed I am to take this trip back (mind you I had initially planned to visit last summer, so you can imagine my disappointment after having worked myself up so much that the possibility of not actually taking the trip was not even imaginable; but it happened and I was crushed). So let me begin by saying that I have not been back since 1998, a full nine years, which is quite a long time, but is even so much longer for a former communist country which experiences change (for better or worse) at a very fast paste. I was not much more than a child when I left. Hence, I am thankful to my parents and my country (along with its numerous problems & paradoxes) for having planted in my heart such an enormous and ever lasting love, that regardless of the fact that I essentially became an adult in the US, a part of my heart will forever belong there.

Having said that, I am scared shitless of going back! Being born and lived part of my adolescence in Albania, and then moving to the US, becoming a US citizen and reaching a certain point of maturity in my life, my heart is divided equally between the two places, with my personality having been influenced equally by both cultures. But somewhere in the middle, there is a hollow gap, which tells me that in pieces I am a little bit of both, but as a whole, I am like neither of the two places. I have forever lost that feeling of belonging. I feel as if I have been left hanging somewhere in the vast grandness of the ocean which separates the old world from the new one. I am scared to the very essence of my core, of breathing in the air of a city which will surround me with unfamiliar streets and unrecognizable human faces. I am scared that I will get lost in my own city. I am scared of walking by the windows of my old apartment only to see the strangers that inhabit it now. I am scared of feeling like a stranger in my own country!

When I go back, one thing is for sure, I plan to walk all over my city (Tirana), without aim, purpose or reason. I simply desire to walk every square foot of that city, perhaps in a desperate attempt to catch up with its soul, ask for forgiveness for having been absent for so long, and get reacquainted. I do not know for sure if these or other fears will materialize when I am present there, but I know that I will experience a feeling which I have not felt in a long time. In spite of feeling like a stranger or not, I will know with definitive certainty that the noises coming from that city will speak to me in my mother tongue, and that would be enough to make my visit back a splendid adventure!