Te echo de menos

Oh Spain, how I miss you. A piece of my heart is still in Santander. A piece of my heart is in every city I went to and fell in love with.

As I drove home (my home home, the one in Steamboat) I was looking at the sun breaking through the orange leaves and as I drove by was astounded, as I always am, about the fire that bursts off the trees when light hits them right as you fly by in your car. Few things are as beautiful as fall in Colorado. I think I was saved from the lasting heart ache of a boy, because I first fell in love with a place. Falling in love with a place hurts just as much as heart break when you leave it, but unlike a boy who walks away, it stays there waiting for you. And so, as I look back at all the places I have walked away from, I can't help but smile because I know at any point..... I can walk back.

Okay so not literally walk, I can't walk across the ocean, but I can always return. Tonight was the Alumni Dinner for CSU students who went abroad. They asked us to use a pipe cleaner to create a model of how we felt since we have returned. The idea was to create a graph type line of ups and downs. Mine was a plane. I don't feel anything except longing to go back. No ups and downs, just reality. I am here, pieces of my heart are there, and that is so so bittersweet.

All I know is this: the story is absolutely not finished. That is the fantastic thing about our generation: the job market is horrible, and we have access to the world. Those two things give us no better excuse to go live abroad. And so, here is the new goal:

graduate (survive college) and go back. Then the blogs will be exciting again and not full of heart sick rants about how I wish I was still living abroad. Yet here I am, in my dress from Sweden, my scarf from Spain, and my shoes from Italy drinking a pumpkin spice latte and watching the sun go down and you know what? I think life, wherever it has taken me, is pretty damn fabulous.