Like Night and Day

The view from our new aparment at midnight.

 The view from our new aparment in the morning.

          Man, it is different here. It really is like night and day in ways. Please don't mistake that for a judgement on either place. It's not. Rather, I'm begining to understand a particular frustration that many of my foriegn students feel: a longing for 2 completely different places, which leaves you disoriented and unsatisfied. How can I simultaneously ache for two places, and how can I reconcile that fact since I can never be in both at once? How can two things so seemingly different both feel so comfortable? How can I be relieved to be in one, but also instantly want to visit the other? It's a conundrum.

         When I arrived back home in June, I smelled the hot pavement of the nashville airport and tasted stickyness of the air and knew without a doubt where I was. I told my Dad that you could have blindfolded me and had me test the smells of one hundred places and I still would have known. I've never been more acutely aware of what home meant to me until this summer.
     
         Then later on as we prepared to move back here to start the school year I started thinking about Cidgem. I could envision our Turkish neighborhood with the specific detail that I could other places I've lived, like Nashville and Knoxville. How bizarre to intimately know two places on opposite sides of the globe and to envision what was happening at them.  As we descended towards the Esenboga airport I wondered if I would have the same experience when stepping outside. It was unmistakable.

I'm glad to be back. My heart is in both places, but I feel a peace that I am in the correct one for now.