Study Abroad

When I shoved what felt like my entire life into two black suitcases and a baby-pink Northface backpack to move to Lyon, France for seven months, I distinctly remember thinking that this just can’t be reality. All of the scholarship applications, visa forms and endless emails between study abroad coordinators felt as if it was leading up to the most climactic moment of my life that would never actually reach me. And when it unexpectedly did, it dragged me like some cruel whirlwind of loneliness and goodbyes, panic in missed flights, stresses about money, shock over how different these foreign streets look — a longing for the familiar parallel lines of Columbia, Missouri, and her rolling emerald plains, against this new, sharp background of spiraling streets lined with cut stone houses and their wrought-iron balconies. A palette of sounds making up syllables and finally words that seemed familiar on my university writing exams, yet in real life, seemed as strange and distant as my life in America, where I watched the clock oppressively, unfairly and surely unwaveringly tick and tock in my absence.

“It’ll be over before you know it; time will fly,” they all said to me, and in turn I smiled softly and promised to savor every moment. A promise I’d broken many times — how can I, when I am daydreaming of the cozy, warmly-lit booths I miss so dearly in Ellis Library while sitting in the cold, fluorescent bookshelves of Jean-Moulin III? When I am silently comparing the lonely blue bus against my little Mitsubishi that would take me home in half the time, adorned with a crystal cat figurine on the dash, of which my close friend owns her sister, a matching galaxy? And now that I have passed a seemingly short month in France, January became June, and I once again find myself lingering in the longing for something I can no longer have. I wish I could paint every corner of that cold, fluorescent library from memory. I long to study the patterns on the seats of the Lyonnais buses. To have appreciated every seemingly mundane moment of silence, sitting across from my beloved friends who have all returned to their homes — Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, and so on — in that bouchon tucked into Vieux Lyon which we likely won’t return to, at least not for some good years. If only I could go back and tell my friends I made in Lyon that I love them, that I am present in every moment, and that they will be missing from me forever.

To have not been, underneath it all, longing for a different reality — whether it be my life in the U.S., or to be living the false perfection of a study abroad semester I unfairly held myself to. Today, I struggle with the realization that every moment I have ever lived has paled in comparison to its predecessor, only for its successor to then become that very predecessor, everything held constant but time. It is incredibly easy to blow wishes to the keys of my laptop about how I should have given tighter hugs, donned a few more genuine smiles, and written many more love letters. It is incredibly difficult to realize that right now, the moment I drum this string of keys, is the foundation of regrets and ingredient of wishes. This is the very second I will fantasize of in three month’s time, where I had nothing better to do than to read and write in a 9m² apartment guarded by Notre-Dame de Fourvière on its shining, arbored cliff. And yet, in six month’s time, I’ll yearn anew for the weeks of summer spent in Missouri after a long few days in France, hugging and kissing my American friends like I’d not seen them since I was a small child. To seize and savor life is to recognize that the moment I hold in my hands, the one I see through my eyes currently, is the only moment that I will ever truly live, and I am only a culmination of these fleeting moments — destined to be romanticized, and if I am lucky, truly and deeply experienced.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: University of Jean Moulin-Lyon III