Current mood:drunkedly drunk
i am sitting around after work, drinking beer and playing on the internet. and all i can think about is that i got to see the last of the poland pictures last night. it felt sad, seeing that those were the last. that no more are coming until i go back, again. to take more. and that leads me back to the very confusing and neverending feeling that i am in love with, and miss terribly, a country that i had never been to before. until those three weeks, a few months ago. it reminds me of how i feel about certain members of my extended family, love and dislike and impatience and devotion. continual fascination with the way they do the tiniest things. my polish relatives really are/were products of their environment. it's astounding.
i remember the feeling of the last days there, in krakow. i really really really wanted to come home. and part of that was due to skinheads and preachers' wives, auschwitz and transit inspectors (who threatened us with arrest), ridiculously dubbed american movies on the t.v. that made me inexplicably burst into tears, and the feeling that krakow is too much of an international tourist destination for the residents to look at us americans as anything but americans. touristy, annoying americans. suddenly everyone was addressing us in english before we even opened our mouths. despite that, the language barrier was getting to me. the last few days of our trip apparently had to balance out the awe-inducing hospitality and welcomeness we had mostly encountered up to that point.
and then i was on a plane, terrifying a tall and stoic british man next to me by bursting into tears when we approached san francisco from the north and, as soon as we hit the marin headlands, a wall of fog sprung up to obscure the city. it was a fitting welcome back. and the british man asked me if this was home, and i said yes, that i had been gone for three weeks. he misheard me, exclaiming, "three years!" and i laughed and said no, that although it felt like three years, it hadn't even been a month.
and for weeks after i was back it felt like i hadn't even gone. it was sort of a dream. but now, with the last of the pictures, and hearing the tapes i recorded there, i find myself pining away for a land that i should probably feel less connected to. i guess. maybe that's not true. it was astounding to look around and understand where my family had come from, to see the birch trees that made my grandfather ache for his homeland. "he would get so poetic, when he talked about poland, about the birch trees," my mother told me on the train, as we were heading into the part of the country where both he and my grandmother were from. and there were the skinny, glowing birches, aflame with the sun that had suddenly grown so bright, so warm. it made my heart hurt.
i want to go back, to stay for a while. i want to drink with priests and stuff myself with pierogi and know that, like father leszek said, even though everyone in his tiny village stared at us as we walked through, not a one of them would refrain from pulling us into their homes, feeding us meat that i would try to avoid eating, offer up anything they had. all we had to do was knock. because "a guest in the house is god in the house." hospitality is religion. hot damn.
i miss it so.
