Thoughts on Departure

I'm sitting staring at a gray and white wall in the Airport terminal at the NKY/Cincinnati airport, realizing - not for the first time - that this is probably the most difficult thing I've ever tried to undertake. I am jittery, a bit distant; I feel almost outside of myself. I've felt this way a few times before in my life - moving from Kentucky to San Diego, from San Diego to the Bay area - but nothing compares to this feeling. On the one hand I feel utterly empty, as if I am just going through the obvious motions; on the other hand, the minute I stop to reflect on what's happening I feel utterly paralyzed by the abyss of possibilities unfolding before me, as if there's this huge weight pulling me down.

I have decided that what makes this adventure so ponderous is not that I will be leaving the country, crossing an ocean, and arriving on a whole other and utterly unfamiliar geographical landmass, in a completely new city. After all, I've done that several times in my life. In fact, I have come to realize that none of that concerns me at all. Instead, the scariest thing is not that I will be stranded in a whole other country, but rather that I will be awash in a completely unfamiliar language. If anything, my entire life, the vast amount of social mobility, cultural capital and downright respect I have been able to command from almost everyone I've ever met have all been completely contingent upon my faculty with my native language. Language, I am coming to realize, constitutes a good amount of one's agency; I'm afraid that without English to fall back on, I won't know what to do with myself, how to function. Just think about it for a moment. From anywhere in this country you can get up and move to any other with relative ease, all by virtue of its shared language. Worlds as vastly different as my rural hometown in Kentucky to New York City are all equally accessible because they are really not separate worlds at all; the same language permeates them both.

But now I am throwing myself up against a wall, as it where. My knowledge of Turkish does not extend beyond very few simple expressions; what ultimately separates me from the place I will be living for the next year is not the vast distance, the mounds of earth and sea that lies between here and there, but a world composed almost completely of the Turkish language itself. I think this realization, itself rather plain, is more profound than one first thinks.

Airports are strange places. They are so utterly transient that they really don't belong to anywhere at all. In fact, I have come to believe that airports are essentially a kind of nowhere. I have a layover in DC, then I hop a plane to Vienna, where I will have about one hour to get my boarding pass to Istanbul and make sure that my bags have been transferred. In Vienna! But not really; I imagine the airport will be must like all other airports, people sitting alone, wondering around terminals, completely isolated from one another though they will for a temporary time be confined to the same small place rocketing around the globe. Again, rather obvious, but when one really stops to think it's all rather crazy to say the least. I'll be in Vienna without ever really being there at all.

Okay, enough ranting for now. My nerves have stirred a rebellion in my digestive system, and I might just have to go throw up.