You may be wondering how exactly I came to be wandering around this tiny town alone, crying and eating HoneyNut Cheerios out of the box at 9:00pm on a Saturday, but then again, so was I.
I guess this story starts with Thanksgiving. After chatting with my family on the actual day of, which was hard enough in and of itself, I then made a sort of spanish-rendition of Thanksgiving dinner for my host family on Saturday. Apart from making me appreciate the work that the adults in my family do every year to make that happen, it was a pretty hard day in my life here abroad. Every detail that was different seemed to scream at me that I am all alone, a world away from everything I love. So, even though the dinner itself was pretty successful, it made for a less-than-joyful start to what would become an ever-worsening week.
The next blow came on my Dad's birthday. It was the first time in my life that I hadn't been able to be with him for his birthday, which was so very much harder than I had expected. I missed burning chocolate chip cookies for him, I missed the feeling of Christmas season officially getting here that his birthday always brings, and I missed my Dad, and everything that makes him the best dad anyone could ask for.
Before I could have a moment to breathe, of course, I had a piano recital to deal with, and all of the stress that goes along with that. Now, I'm not exactly a new-comer to the whole piano-recital thing, but somehow having to play in a whole different setting, while knowing half the audience is a little bit more stressful than I had anticipated. I did do OK, even though my fingers shook for a good fifteen minutes after I stopped playing.
This brings us to Saturday.
I started off pretty good, standing outside for 4 hours (in 3-degrees- celsius weather) with my class selling pastries at a Christmas market in the town's main square, and hanging laundry out to dry once I got home. After my fingers and toes finally warmed up, I spent the afternoon in a sort of cold-induced limbo, where going outside seems unthinkable, but the house just seems to shrink and shrink and shrink until it feels unbearably small.
I'm not sure exactly sure what triggered my sizable mental breakdown, whether it was the violent outburst of screaming coming from one of the little boys' rooms, my host sister and I's misunderstanding, or a combination of the two, but I suddenly felt the very panicky need to get out.
So I did.
I wrapped myself up in a couple of jackets, a couple of pairs of socks, and a couple more scarves, and I went for a walk. I took some random turns until I finally got myself lost on the hilly cobblestone streets and then set out to find my way home. On the way, I came across the church, which was still holding mass, a really quiet little square where someone had put up cute little Christmas lights, and a creepy statue, which I'm quite confident will still be giving me nightmares twenty years from now. When I finally got back to a street I really recognized, I headed over to the grocery store and found (to my great delight) that there was one last, lonely box of HoneyNutCheerios standing in the cereal isle.
I of course grabbed it at once, and headed back out into the cold air, and began eating them right there. I'm pretty sure I looked like a crazy person, and almost definitely somebody I know saw me, but at that moment, with Fall Out Boy's song Sugar, We're Going Down Swinging playing a little too loud in my ears, I could not care less.
