on moving on and reflecting

I had been infected with a terrible wanderlust that came upon me sophomore year.  It was my first taste of the pleasure of traveling, of associating wonderful memories with a specific city.  Kyoto planted it there, and I had little time to process it before I hurled myself into my next destination — Johannesburg, in South Africa — immediately afterwards.

An esteemed friend of mine, Christopher, with whom our close and immediate friendship ended that summer as summer friendships do, said that perhaps it was the best coping mechanism of all — to move on somewhere else, and be distracted by —————.  But memories, experiences and discoveries about myself in Kyoto turned into dust, scattered to the winds, as I found myself in the wilderness of this African city that I had not prepared myself for in any means.  I learned wonderful and terrible things about myself, and about a world that I had never cared to know.

And after South Africa, I flew to Korea to catch by breath before flying yet again to another uncharted territory in my life — England — for a study abroad.

I wish I had done a better job of recording my time in those three places.  I kept a blog, but as I read the drafts of unfinished entries, of thoughts that only seemed to teeter at something poignant but instead seemed to drift off at the promise of it, frozen in its potential, I mourn the value of what could have been.  Of course, much of this is in the narcissistic sense.  I mourn the poetry that I had never written, the insightful commentary about life and the world that I could have written, and proven that I had uncovered a gem about life’s mysteries way before anyone else did.

Now I've left the U.S. and realized, startlingly, that ...

I realized when I was talking to a friend of mine, who was telling me about the changes that had come over his home in Singapore, and how __strange that made him feel, how exoticized his country had been made to him, and he asked me whether it made sense to attach emotions, locational nostalgia, to a place... call it home...  and I realized that I'd never once been able to truly call one place my home...