There are seven billion hearts in this world. So many are right where they belong. Some are still searching for the place they know exists, tailor-made for them. And others know exactly where they rest yet cannot stay there. I am an exchange student, so my own is a heartbreaking mix of all three.
My heart belongs in Italy. Those words ring truer than any others in my head right now. Yet my family – my mom, my dad, my sisters, and some of my best friends in the world are right here with me, in Houston. And somewhere woven between my two homes exists the knowledge that there’s something else out there.
But right now (for the past forty days, really) all I can think about is the place my heart wants to be. A country so full of beauty, bursting with the most amazing foods you’ve ever eaten, and home to some of the best people I’ve ever known.
The goodbye that hurt the most when I left Italy wasn’t the last hug my host mom wrapped me into at the airport. It wasn’t the tearful, heart-wrenching scene played out in front of a McDonald’s in Milan, when I saw some of my best exchange friends for the last time. It wasn’t waving at the black car my friend drove to my house mere hours before my early morning flight because he couldn’t let me leave without saying goodbye one last time.
What really made my heart break was sitting in that seat on the airplane, clutching at my friend’s hand as the plane left Italian soil. At that very second, I felt every single thing I had worked for being ripped away from me at five hundred miles an hour. Endless sleepovers flashed through my head – memories that could have been made laughing alongside my best friend, squashed before they even had a chance to grow. I could almost taste all the dishes my host mom and I swore we’d make before I had to leave the home she so selflessly welcomed me into. I pictured the sun glinting off Lake Como, broken only by ripples of my friends’ cannonballs – perfect lake days that squeezed past me, the kinds of days that could have given me the confidence to say ‘I belong’ when surrounded by the friendships I formed in the last few months of exchange. Every word I had learned, the never-ending grammar concepts I painstakingly committed to memory flew through my head, the would-be building blocks of conversations I would never get to join into, jokes I could never make, declarations of love and friendship gone unspoken.
How do you finish a life you don’t want to say goodbye to?
How do you say goodbye to a life you didn’t get to finish?
If I never find the answers, I know I’ll still survive. I’ll even get better, because in the very moment my heart broke, a tiny thread of invincible hope started holding it together again. However thin it began, however thin it will remain, that thread is forged, is fueled by the knowledge that I already did it once. I learned a new language. I found friends in a place 6,000 miles away from where I belonged. Not just friends. I found families, with moms that cared for me and dads that teased me and siblings that laughed with me. I took a place that felt more foreign than anything I had ever known and I turned it into home.
If I did that once, I can do it again. Wherever I am. My heart will always be at home, and it will never be at home. Not only because I have two but because I learned how to create a spot fit just for me wherever I go. I’ll feel at rest in Houston; I’ll always yearn for Italy. And the exchange student in me knows there are endless possibilities wherever I choose to go.
A presto, Italia.