Space Warp

For the most part I think I'm getting used to life here. I'm getting used to the fact that I can't buy eyedrops and asprin at the same store as milk and bread. I no longer instinctively look for my red Mercury Tracer — currently being driven by my brother in Rexburg, Idaho — in parking lots when I leave a store. Speaking of cars, I no longer giggle at tiny Smart cars and am now shocked whenever (if ever) I see a pickup truck or SUV. I feel at ease with public transit and I'm comfortable with my new routines.

But I don't think this place will ever completely stop feeling foreign to me. Which is OK. It's good for me to live in an environment that's somehow, ever-so-slightly off from all my internal programming. It's humbling and exciting and sometimes frustrating, but it's good. I'm certain however, that it will always feel weird. Like if the Earth experienced a slight but abrupt change in the gravitational pull. Everyone would be tripping and running into things at first. Then they'd get used to it and be able to get around, but it would never feel quite right.

I realized this today when Jake and I went to a big hardware store called Hornbach a couple of bus stops from home that we'd never been to before. Although it was a big boxy store with a good-sized parking lot, it still had a distinctly German feel from the exterior. Something about the color scheme or the arrangement of things. It's hard to pin down. Weird gravitational pull. But when we went inside it looked, to the T, like any American Home Depot store. The layout of the aisles and cash registers, the orange signs and price tags, the fonts on those signs and price tags, the lighting, the displays, the arrangements, the dimensions, the smell, everything felt like we were standing in the Home Depot in our last town in the States. The Earth's gravitational pull was exactly what we were used to. Possibly for the first time since getting here we felt entirely at home, familiar, and comfortable in a public place. We walked through the front sliding doors and just stood there, silent and slack-jawed. It was like walking through some sort of space warp and suddenly we were back in America. We both almost started to cry. Seriously. Next to the cash registers in a hardware store.

I hadn't realized I hadn't felt that way in so long until I felt it again. Now we have a place we can visit whenever our equilibrium feels off. Funny the things that can trigger homesickness over here.



JEM