expat syndrome, take 487

one of the most debilitating side effects of the expat syndrome is trying to reconcile oneself to the fact that the people you love are spread out over countries, over continents. that’s the thing that makes you most restless, no matter which place you’re in – there’s always going to be someone missing.
lying in bed last night, going through a “what if” in my mind: what if i had never attended that very first fachschafts meeting? what if i were one of the many foreign students who never really got involved in german university life? what if i hadn’t spoken to that other american girl in my history class? thinking back even further, how was it that i ended up hearing about the first fachschafts meeting with my (at the time) limited and somewhat nervous understanding of german, or picking an obscure class on british royalty, or making friends with a Romanian during my international students orientation? without these happenings, i would have been a lost soul.

that first day, i was confused out of my mind – in the american university system, classes are chosen months in advance, with priority given according to seniority. as freshmen and sophomores, we got the bottom-of-the-barrel pickings, and had to scramble even for those. it meant that the day before our registration could officially begin, we stayed up until midnight so as to be the first ones online, clogging up the online registration system in order to get the classes of our choice. so the day of the ersti einfuehrung, i kept asking people how we would pick our classes, frantic that i would miss out on the good ones. it took three explanations from the people explaining the course selection booklet to us for me to finally get that in heidelberg, you picked the classes you wanted and just showed up. and precisely at that moment, when the foreigner fog in my brain cleared away to yield some semblance of sanity, i heard one of the tutors mention that there would be a “fachschaftstreff” that night, and anyone interested should stop by the fachschafts café at 6 pm.

i went to the café, a small room with sofas and wild political posters and one sole computer, windows which looked out onto the building right next door, a few chairs, and no sign of coffee. the sofas were old and soft, worn, with a particular smell (not a bad one), bright orange and knobbly. it was a new place for me at the time, but would become so familiar, my second home in between classes when my apartment was too far to walk to. it was too hot in the summer, just right in the winter because of the small white baseboard heaters along the wall. if you were the first one that day to go to the café, and it was locked, you made your way upstairs to the pforte (a small reception room), right in front of the political science library and handed over your student id in exchange for the key to the café. others would trickle in, always the same crowd, most of us part of the either the fachschaftsrat (the 7 elected student board members of the council) or the fachschaftssumpf (i never did figure out what sumpf meant, but knew somehow that it was a.) slang and b.) meant something like “the rest of us” or “the mass, the crowd”). we’d use the computer, take naps, read newspapers, eat, meet, gossip, and goof off. it became for us a small point of commonality within the swirl of a mid-sized city. everyone knew everything about everyone else – word traveled like wildfire amongst the sumpf, and because of it, we (some of us fondly, others in aggravation) called heidelberg a small dorf.

you meet every person twice.

the first meeting is mostly inconsequential. sometimes, the first few meetings remain so. if the person becomes merely a friend, those first meaningless meetings remain largely forgotten. if that person becomes a beloved friend or a lover, an unexpected confidante or a surrogate family member, you strive to retain those memories of when you barely knew each other, laugh at those meetings that seemed unimportant. because somewhere in there, there is an epiphany. another inconsequential meeting from a misinterpretation which ends in a night-long conversation and general mayhem; a fully sincere and loving (and totally unexpected) bear hug during a protest; a shared double-espresso before the 7 am class you both reached after staying up all night to watch the sunrise; a class on queen elizabeth I, where you discover another expat exactly like yourself. in that first fachschaftssitzung, and in subsequent meetings and partings to follow, i met those people who make up my second family.

when i lived in germany, further apart from my parents and brothers than i had ever been, there were moments when i missed them terribly. during holidays of course, when our whole extended family would get together, certain nights after a day that had not gone well at all, that horrendous summer when it seemed like they all fell frighteningly ill (one of the boys broke his arm in june, the second was hospitalized for 2 months with a high fever which the doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of, and dad was rushed to the emergency room because of what everyone thought was a heart attack, and which ended up being a kidney stone that he needed surgery for). things reminded me of them at every turn, something which remained internalized, and unbeknownst to me, that internalization continues today, reaching out to the people who are also like my family. if they hurt, if they’re upset or lonely or scared, if they’ve had a rough summer where nothing seemed to go right, i worry about them for days on end – whether they’re in germany or israel, sri lanka, argentina, australia, or deepest africa. i know they’ll be fine, i know they’ll work through it, but there is also an underlying sense of guilt – helplessness in the fact that i can’t be there for them, even if they themselves don’t really need me to be.

expats never remain happy in one place if people are missing. but at least they can content themselves with having those people in their lives, with having met them in the first place…