Almost Another Year

It has been nearly a year since I left Russia. In one month twenty-four days I will have departed on the Trans-Siberian from the city I grew to love so dear to me. In one month twenty-seven days I will have gotten onto a plane and flown to the United States. Funny how the time has already gone so far past me. I have already turned nineteen and my class is graduating and moving on with their lives, where they will most likely go off to college or a university to pursue a better education to work towards a career. I still am stuck behind them all, on my own behalf, and will not graduate with them. Not only am I stuck in school, I am stuck in Russia.

Everyday is still awakened with a thought of my past year in the old country. Every conversation I have with my dear friends eventually winds onto a road of my experiences in the cold Siberia I love. The smallest things trigger a chain reaction of thoughts and memories that constantly flow through my mind as if it were the blood in my head. Random notes and papers are left around my house with the cursive Russian words and sayings I learned to speak and write, bled into the notes in various inks. Some of them meaningful, some just words. Sometimes they're sad, mostly they're funny. I constantly look around at Clark College and see the faces of random people, but I also see faces that I remember in Chita.

Though I still think everyday about the good times spent there, I have forgotten some of my Russian; since I never practice with anyone but myself and the rare phone call to a friend or family member in Russia. I'll have a conversation with myself in my own understanding of the language and realize my vocabulary is smaller than what it used to be. I'll hear or read something on the internet in Russian and hear a word that I know I know, but can't place a finger on how I know it, or when I use it. Regardless, I still breathe, eat, sleep, speak, and think Russia. Her white is my skin, her blue are the jeans I wear, and her red is my blood...

I am stuck in Russia. My friend Miranda was right about the toll it is taking on my social life, and my personal life as well. My exchange has given me so many things that I have utilized in my daily life back home, but in that aspect it has also created an obsession that I'll never let slip from my mind. What's worse is that I am already an obsessive person. Anybody who knows me could agree with me on this characteristic. Some might say it is just persistency, but it's just another word really. The fact that still remains is that I am lost in the sea of my fixation for Russia, and I am drowning in it.

With all this time that passes by, I wonder if every one of my friends who travelled with me feels the same way that I feel. I know we all miss it dearly, but I wonder if they are as crazy as I am about it. They are all moving on with their lives and finding great things along the way to cherish their memories, and they seem to be content with it, in my perspective (which is unreliable). And as the time goes by we all seem to forget the little things and traditions we used to all do. I remember when we used to say that we loved each other, and we would say it so often as the time came closer to leaving. The months after went by and we all still were reminded of it. But now it seems that has all changed, and I don't know why. I would still like to remind them all that I love them dearly, because I still do. But doing that would be awkward and disrupt us from the nature of our current lives. I'd like to say that I am the only that feels this way. I'd like to say that all of us feel this way. But I can't even be sure of both anymore.

Things have changed, and they are still changing between all of us. I can't expect things to be like they used to because that would be ridiculous and only a dream. I still picture that house I talked about with Michelle once, with all of us put in it living together and being a family of friends. Since things are changing, no one wants that life but me, and this image will never come true in my world. I am fine with that, because it is quite childish for me to dream about that. Reading those words again is ludicrous itself. Though I wish that life was one that could become a reality. One's thing is for sure: life will go on and things will get better because they always do, but they rarely ever happen the way any of us say they will.

Still, it would be beautiful.

Chita

Wrapped in winter's freezing hands
She brings warmth in her glory
Her life lingers slowly here
In the tundra below forty

The hills of birch surround
As the moon covers her soft
The snow falls into place
Laying down to make her loft

She lays there in the forest
The forest of everlasting old
The wind beats fiercely
It's voice whispers cold

Her shadows stretch into night
Covering all in a robe of darkness
While approaching the morning dawn
She casts out the shadows' heartless

Then spring raides her lands
The sun shines down so bright
The snow dispears from around her
And brings her into a world of light

Now she dances with life
Summer's beauty is in her
But beauty only lasts so long
She'll dance until winter.