the arrival.

It reeked of cigarettes. Even in the seconds as we passed the exit that led out to the street, the stench made its way inside just as the glass door slid shut, like yet another passenger running late for a flight. I felt like a sheep, zombie-walking slowly through the terminal, guided only by the omnipresent fluorescent yellow signs that read “Arrivals”.  I was overtired, and too many hours awake had forced my perception back to a basic state of abstracted reality. The people around me became bouncing circles, windows became blue squares, and still, at the center of each irreal tableau, a saintly juxtaposition, shrouded in neon light, was the same bright yellow sign luring me like a moth to the promised land of baggage claim.

It was a dreamy sort of fatigue, induced by what I estimate to have been 40 sleepless days and nights on a freezing airplane, not even close to rectified by what I estimate to have been 13 ounces of bitter instant coffee. I felt happy, and nothing else. I kept waiting for it to hit me, that this would be my home for a year. But it never did. Not meeting my host family, or on the car ride home, or slipping into my new bed. I felt like I’d spent the night in an old opium den, and whether I stepped out into a calm morning or into the fray of sudden armageddon, I’d remain relatively unphased. Here was my first 24 hours, the most important moment of my stay, and I had wasted it all, caught in either sleep or delusion! Not even a day in and I had broken the first commandment of life abroad, an exigence to appreciate and analyze the first day in a place. This meant- obviously- that I was doomed to live in a sort of travelers purgatory, never having arrived, suspended between my feeble notion of home and a place that I’d seen but didn’t in any way know.

It seems worthwhile to mention here that I’d been to France, and to the same region of Bretagne, once before in the same year; at that time I can say I truly felt shock that comes with arriving in a completely new place. So perhaps it was that ounce of familiarity that rendered dull the rays of afternoon light coming in through windows I’d already looked out of, albeit only once. The feel in that second first sight of France was less electric, but in place of that raw excitement lay a deep and rich contentedness; in a sleepy brain that churned out a sentence at a time I could see a boldface headline heralding one thought, in foreign tongue: “Comme j’adore ce pays!”

I phoned my mother that night. My real mother, that is. “Where are you?” she asked. And what to respond? Yes, I was ‘here’, in France, in a house. But had I arrived? Had I brought my life and my mind into this country with my body? And would it offend her if I told her I was home, with my family? Not my real family, of course, and therefore by default my fake one? When, finally, could I consider myself officially ‘arrived’? When I can call this place home, I suppose. Does that mean I lose my home in New Mexico?

“You know, of course,” she told me, “that home is where the heart is.”

“My cardiovascular organ, if you please, is here with me in Rennes. If it wasn’t, I’d be dead.” (If it isn’t clear by now, I’ll tell you one of my personal maxims is to remain obstinate always and maintain a general attitude of smart-assery).

Yes, those first moments in a country are beautiful, but that’s not when I arrived. Upon fitting into the daily routine of things, I realize it’s the best and most happy moment of coming to a new place; the reason I came to begin with; it’s arriving. I didn’t arrive when I got here. I arrived when I got lost taking the bus for the first time, and when I finally gathered up the courage to offer my opinions at the dinner table, practicing my words in my head three times first for fear of incorrectly conjugating the subjunctive and henceforth being banned from discussion and possibly deported. I arrived when I spoke three words to the woman making my coffee and she didn’t notice I was american, and I am arriving while writing this sentence. Tomorrow I will arrive, and I will keep arriving until the day I depart. I could be scared of that notion; of staying in this limbo, theoretically the first circle of hell! And I am, actually. But the body knows no difference between fear and excitement; the palms sweat the same and the heart beats with the same cadence... Isn't that how we know we’re alive?