My grade seven students were surprised to find that class had already ended, shocked by the observation made earlier in the lesson that it had been a year and a half since they had completed the important exhibition that concludes grade five.
Time is funny like that.
I first moved overseas ten years ago.
My then-boyfriend and I got on a plane and slept better on the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, the second leg of our journey, than we had in the nights leading up to our departure. We landed in Malaysia knowing nothing about what we were doing, I realized later, and it’s a good thing, too. Had we known how much we didn’t know, we never would have gone.
I’ve been much more prepared for subsequent moves and I can only shake my head at everything that went wrong that first time. Sometimes I ask myself why I hadn’t simply spent a little more time on the internet doing some pretty basic research, but then I remember that the world was a different place ten years ago. Information was not expected to be at our fingertips, so we didn’t spend much time looking. Unlike today, a world in which we are paralyzed by the amount of available information, I trusted what I was told and moved on.
Considering the ten years since getting on that plane, I cannot be more grateful for not knowing, for not having asked, for letting blissful ignorance guide me in the direction of what could logically be considered a stupid decision. Shortly before departure, I learned that my boss had quit, and found out upon arrival that ground had not been broken for the promised staff apartments and that the school itself was a hard-hat zone without consistent running water. Had I walked into those conditions today, I would have headed straight back to the airport.
But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and most of us who arrived were optimistic to a fault. It’s kind of a beautiful trait, actually, because it kept us going. We said “yes” again and again when everything around us was screaming “no”.
Optimism or utter foolishness, depending on how you look at what happened next.
In the end, my then-boyfriend and I moved (well-prepared!) to different countries, staying together for a year only to separate upon reuniting the next. Subsequently, I spent a few years deciding who I wanted to be now that I’d grown up. Armed with experience and facing a dearth of options, I took the only one there was: A small school had offered me a job, a small school in a small town that, according to my scouring of Google Maps, had a climbing hall. The news everywhere said that a pandemic was a bad time to find a new job, so the only logical answer was to take it.
In just over a month, I’ll take the German citizenship test for the chance that I’ll apply for citizenship here one day, a sure sign that I’ve decided to call this place home. For this, I can thank learning the language and falling in love with a local. We laugh when telling people about the dot on the map that brought us together, and remain in awe of the travel experiences that had us, for years, in the same corners of the world mere months apart.
I remain astonished at how small the world is, and I think I moved abroad to live that for myself. I signed and then broke a two-year contract, and then I blinked and ten years went by.
By Rebecca Michelle 