Finding Home

I was sitting on a train making its way from Paris to Geneva. This was the 2nd leg of my first journey ever by myself. I had just turned 21. Paris had felt triumphant to me. After all, I had put myself on a train in Edinburgh with only my backpack and had managed to arrive successfully in Paris. Not only had I made it to Paris, but I had survived for 3 days! I had found a youth hostel, peered at Paris from the lofty heights of Notre Dame, made an attempt to scale the Eiffel Tower (the elevator broke!), gorged myself on museums, eaten crepes sold by street vendors, rendezvoused with friends from the States for one lovely day of familiarity....and now for reasons that seemed unclear to me, I was throwing myself back into the unknown.

I felt sad and alone and very foreign on the train. It had become very clear to me that day that my triumph in Paris was an illusion and that I truly had no idea what I was doing and no business traveling as I was. I didn't understand kilometers yet, I couldn't read the train schedules, I couldn't speak the language and I was obviously too young and stupid to know better. I had presented myself at the train station that morning to buy a ticket to Geneva. Mysteriously, there was nothing anywhere that indicated that any trains ever went to Geneva, or, in fact, to anywhere at all but northern France, Holland or Belgium. After wandering for what felt like hours, I found an English speaker and asked. I was at the wrong station! It had never occurred to me that a city might have more than one train station. My day was shot; I had planned to buy the ticket, spend a leisurely day at the Louvre, then head out. Now I shot across town, bought the ticket, and tried to walk back to the Louvre. Unfortunately, my sense of scale was all off and, though I made it within viewing distance of the museum, I had to turn back or risk missing my train. I felt like everyone I passed on the street, everyone in the train station, everyone on the train, knew what an idiot I was. Everyone had a place to be or a place to go, a place to belong, but me. I was uprooted, a minor piece of driftwood floating through these well-anchored lives.

As the light faded and we trundled off into evening, these thoughts grew stronger. I was no longer the independent young woman who had learned to wiggle her thumb at the Metro ticket seller and yell out, "en simple." I was alone, I was afraid, I was going somewhere I had never been before.

The woman across from me asked did I speak English? was I an American? She asked a few more questions and must have seen the loneliness in me because she leaned down and dug through her bag. "Here. I have extra and now I find I don't need them." She handed me an apple and a pear. I bit into the apple. "You know, this train stops in Zurich for an hour. They have, em, Christmas lights? Very beautiful lights over the main street. You should go and see them." I thanked her and nodded and drifted back into my litany of self abuse. When the train pulled into Zurich, I had no intention of going to see those lights. But my feet picked me up and took me off the train before I could stop myself.

I drifted out of the station and into fairyland. It was dark and snowy. There were white lights strung like a fountain of pure, bright droplets cascading up and down the road. People were out shopping, bustling through the streets.

And here I was drifting, still with no place here, no roots, but I felt my spirit rise with the wonder of the unknown adventure. My fear and my loneliness nestled together into a core wrapped over with joy.

"Look," those lights said to me, "look at us. See what the people here have done. For you, this is the unknown. But these people live here, they've created comfort here. And you could choose this comfort, too, no matter where you go. Because it's only the first step that's unknown and then you're there and you belong. If you choose to you can stay and be comforted and comfortable, or you can continue into the next unknown and carry your comfort with you."

I went back to the train, ate my pear, and rode on to Geneva.

copyright 2006 J. Autumn Needles