a place I used to call home.

It's all very odd, this living business. It's especially strange if you do it right. It seems very basic that a natural part of life is to allow people in, to see at least parts of you and come to whatever conclusions about you that they may. That is really beautiful, but it's also scary. In allowing yourself to feel anything at all, you run this risk of not measuring up in the eyes of others. The fear that they might not see in you all that you hope is there can be a crippling one. But with diligence and patience, all the little things about you and them that aren't perfect begin to fade, and all of the differences that seemed so staggering and impossible to overcome seem small and petty.

Five months ago I landed on a very large, strange, and foreign continent, feeling very alone in the world. And then something happened. Over the few days that followed, I met 23 people. These 23 people were born in 8 different countries. Together, collectively, we speak somewhere between 9 and 11 languages. At first, it didn't seem how it would all work. These were people I just met. Acquaintances. On the surface they all seemed very neat and different, in some ways like a new toy still in its' packaging, but also with the sheer mystery. It was easy to make first impressions, I found, but as time passed I found also that many of my first impressions were wrong. It's a strange process that happens when you live with someone, when you spend every waking moment with them and share in all of life for a long time. It's something deeper than the sort of "getting to know them" that only takes a conversation or two, where you can say you know someone, add them as a friend on facebook, and have a little common ground for when you see them in passing. Living with someone exposes them, shows them to be who they truly are. You can dress yourself up for a time, but eventually all the cracks start to show themselves: the flaws, the dirt, the insecurities, the pain. The good things too, are all the more evident. it's in this intimacy of living together that great attributes like joy and generosity and kindness can reveal themselves in a sincere way, because it's here that you get to see them when nobody's looking. If you live with someone long enough, you truly know them. Deeper than the surface, there lies everything about them which is now revealed to you: hopes, dreams, pain, flaws, and the alchemy of joy and sorrow that all of us share. Down at the heart of it we're all flawed, beautiful creatures. When you live with someone you get to understand a little more about what that means, and it's wonderful.

but there's something even more wonderful than this. These countless interactions, big and small, that make us get to know someone and allow us to love them does something more than inform us about the truth of something outside of ourselves. It changes who we are, too. It's something my dad once said to my grandfather as the time was growing short: "Everything I learned I learned from you. The things about you that were great, I did my best to take as my own. The things about you that are flawed, I did what I could do differently." And perhaps that's the true joy of sharing life with other people, is that you find the good in them rubbing off on you, and if you're wise about it even the bad in them can be a teaching to you.

I've struggled with the term "grown-up." not on some emotional level, as though I'm either in a rush to grow up or want to stay a child forever, but I don't get it on a definitional level. I don't think it means anything. I don't think there will ever be some point in life where you cross over from being a child to being an adult, despite what professional graduation and wedding planners might tell you. It's a process of change, and it's up to us to make the choice to think about what it means to live well and change towards that. To take what's good about life and expand on it, and to realize what isn't constructive towards goodness and expel those things from our life. This is a truth I wouldn't have understood if I hadn't lived with others.

The other part of living with people that requires all the courage we can muster is this: you live with someone long enough and you just get used to them and you find comfort in them. Life's more fun together, and it's nice to just exist together for a while with people who know you. You get to the point a few months in where a lot of the hard work is done and the rewards of just being able to love each other and live together begin to pay off. It's nice, and nothing to complain about. But sometimes, life together has to end. When you live with someone, they get this piece of you that nobody else can take and that time can't erase, and it makes saying goodbye and looking into the uncertainty of the future painful.

It's especially hard in this case, because it's 23 goodbyes all at once, and my family scatters off to 5 different continents, leaving me in peace to wander southeast asia alone. In all of my previous goodbyes I had the well-founded hope that there would inevitably be times in this life where our paths would cross again. And I can still have those hopes, of course, but this time I know in my heart that many of these goodbyes are the real thing, and that no matter how much I love this person from the bottom of my heart, most likely I'll never see them again in this life. and that's painful, but I find joy in it because although the future is so uncertain, the future can't change the past. In the times we shared together I was left changed, and the love and life that we've shared will carry on with me in all the time to come.


This post is dedicated to Abraham, Aom, Art, Austin M, Ball, Benz, Brittany, Caleb, David, Esther, Eve, Gift, Isabel, Josch, Rebecca, Ribka, Samm, Stephanie, Taay, Tadam, Taylor, Thearith, and X.