The Good Ol' Days?

My mom asked me today for the umpteenth time about high school.  If I thought that I'd felt abandoned when they sent me off to boarding school.  I think she was feeling a bit convicted when an MK/TCK blog she was reading about boarding school mentioned how a lot of kids felt abandoned by their parents when they went.  I never felt abandoned.  It didn't bother me that I was in Germany while my parents were in Spain and that I'd only see them every couple months for a couple of weeks.  When my mom left that January morning in 2001, leaving me in the bleachers of my new school, she was the one who was crying.  Not me.

I did have a lot of issues in high school.  I never really made friends, some of the friends I'd made abandoned me.  The world I thought I knew literally blew up one afternoon in September 2001.  I thought I was thousands of miles away from my real "home" and struggled to feel like I fit in.  I never did.  I still don't really talk to people from high school, unlike my brother and sister.  I have some of them on Facebook, and I'm still a bit ambivalent.  If I miss anything about high school now, in retrospect, it's the fact that living on the border of France and Switzerland, in Germany, and being able to fly to Spain every couple weeks was something that at the time I didn't unappreciate, I just didn't quite appreciate as much as I do now.  I miss Herbstmesse in Basel and the tradition of meeting at the bumper cars at 7:30 in the Münsterplatz to overrun it with English speakers duking it out.  I miss wandering the streets of Basel and camping out at Starbucks, begrudgingly making it back to the Klaraplatz or the SBB station to get back to the dorms and sleep.  I miss French field trips to Colmar and Strasbourg.  I miss History field trips to Paris and Normandy.  I miss Senior Trip to Florence, Rome, and Venice.  I miss hopping on a flight every two, three months to Málaga (it's cheaper to fly into Málaga than Sevilla because of all the Germans who fly down for the beach; it has a bigger airport too) with a layover in Zurich (to which we'd take a train out of Basel instead of a plane), Geneva, Barcelona...  I miss shopping days in Freiburg, shopping trips to Carrefour in Mulhouse.  I miss school weekend trips to the Swiss Alps and Lake Constance.

I miss the time a friend from school and I got together one weekend in August to spend some time at the town feria and then heading down to the beach in Marbella the next day, staying up half the night on the marble floor in the living room in the sweltering heat and spying geckos in the cracks in the wall and ceiling.  It's funny because looking back on my period of high school, when I thought I had everything all figured out, being convinced that I was "American" and couldn't be anything but, and then realizing sometime in 2006 that where I really should be was Spain and when I went back two years later realizing how right I was and how wrong I'd been in high school.

I was convinced that the United States I'd left behind was the real United States, and when we went back more permanently in 2004 after I graduated and had to move on with life, I realized that it wasn't like the way I'd always thought it was, and I think I've been living with that disillusionment ever since.  What's worse is that when I went back to Spain in 2008 for my study abroad program I saw the Spain I thought I'd left behind in 2008.  I wasn't disillusioned, in fact, my feelings were accurate.

And I sometimes still have to keep asking myself, the pessimist that I am, is if that Spain that I still have high expectations is just an illusion, like the United States I was convinced existed back in high school.