One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

-Elizabeth Bishop

If nothing else, in this, the first half of my trip (well nearly), I've become a good loser.

To recap: it's been a busy three months. Standing in a crowd at Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport, I said goodbye to my parents. I was amazed at how little I cried. The confusion of where do I stand/where is my group/do I still have my passport? had kind of taken hold of me, numbed me, as well as the impossibility of leaving -- complicating matters, Lisa had, at that point, not seen me for three weeks, and was busily and lovingly hugging my left arm as I awkwardly patted my father's.

"You'll be fine," Mom said, and "Sei gut, Tochter," Dad said, and I said "mmhmm", and we teared up briefly but not histrionically and then they left.

Then suddenly we were in Chicago, holding heavy, heavy bags, and then the group from the tiny Minnesotan college was sailing over the ocean, waking up to the stewardess asking us if we would like red wine with our dinners and enjoying in that instant this thrilling sort of flash of not being in Kansas anymore. And then we were in Athens, which was definitely not Kansas, or Minnesota, or Germany, and just as I'd learned to read a map we were on a tiny plane out of there.

And then Ikaria, where Lisa and I spent our days walking around Agios-Kirikos, suddenly two very-foreign foreigners wandering the streets, marveling at the cliffs and letting the waves wash over our feet. We were the two girls outside the fish shop petting the stray cats and occasionally whispering harshly to each other, desperate to not make a scene in front of the Greeks.

And then -- too soon -- we got in the plane, said goodbye to the cliffs and the waves and the cats and the goats -- then we were in the Athenian airport, and I was saying goodbye again, which this time meant letting them go, letting the quirks of the sixteen people I'd been with for the past three weeks stop mattering and grow into moot points as they walked through the checkpoint towards their gate.

And Lisa was hugging me again, zombie-like and soft in a pre-dawn haze; "We'll miss you, we love you, but of course you know that," said Argie, and then I had to do it, had to walk right while they walked left, and then there was no we anymore. I cried bitterly in the bathroom.

I arrived in London, said goodbye. I arrived in Bray, said hello, found myself in a house full of individuals again -- some were familiar campus faces, but some were from far away, whose names I (at this point exhausted with names) had trouble remembering even a week later. I was placed in one school, learned some names, was taken out, was placed in another school, learned more names (first and last, and some utterly unfamiliar to me -- Aoife, Dan-Ben, Venji?), had blurry evenings, laughed a lot, argued bitterly, wrote terrible poems, baked a pie, crafted some essays in a flurry, cooked a farewell dinner, then left again.

Having called the taxi, I flung my backpack on my shoulder, woke her up. "Make sure it's okay," my roommate Olivia said blurrily in the (again) far-too-morning-light-ness of my leaving --- "make sure they're nice, and call me," and then she fell asleep again.

They were nice, though. I was picked up from a bus station by a woman in a blue van and driven to an uncertain future, and I've gotten lucky. The Collinses are not axe murderers. They are kind people. They, like the school, wish I could stay later (I think), and are looking forward to seeing me again.

Because the thing about losing is (I hope) that the things we lose come back to us.

On Saturday my parents and my brother will fly in, exhausted, excited. We will visit the school -- we will meet the children, and I will remember their names, because after a month they're stuck in my head forever -- then later maybe we will come here, to Cork, and they will meet this family, and pet these goats, and laugh at these children.

And then they will leave, and although it will be hard to see them go, I will be off to Barcelona for a week, and then to Germany, and I will find more things, and I will lose them, and then after it all I will be back, and failing a giant bump on the head, everything I've found on this trip will be in there still.

Cause part of you pours out of me

In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you, darling
Still, I'd be on my feet.

-Joni Mitchell