i am a human being (published ~early 2012)

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown

My world became much larger in July of 2007. I spent a month studying in Cambridge, England. But my heightened awareness did not stem primarily from the lectures on British foreign and social welfare policies. These were lessons that could have been packaged and delivered anywhere. It came instead from the serene and relaxed sensation that I felt somewhere inside my brain when I realized I was surrounded by complete strangers, none of whom were Americans, while we sat together watching the new Harry Potter movie and shared a bag of weird British candy. The emotion grew in strength during those soccer matches on Saturday afternoons, when we amateurs from America miraculously defeated the amateurs from Europe. And then I felt it again when we went to Francis Crick’s favorite pub for food – playing chess, drinking beer, discussing the state of the planet we lived on.

And the emotion expanded even more when I was sitting on a balcony with a Belgian friend. He talked to me about his girlfriend, about how he couldn’t wait to have sex when he got back home. “I’m a virgin,” I told him. “That’s too bad,” he said, before proceeding to try and convince me that God did not exist. “He must exist,” I told him. “The world is too complicated not to have a designer.” He shook his head at me. “You should read Richard Dawkins sometime,” he said. And then we would play poker, and discuss literature, and argue about politics, and make funny noises at night in the courtyard until the guard told us to shut up, goddamn it. “Quiet down! What the hell is the matter with you?”

But there were many others besides the Belgian – there was a Chinese girl and a Taiwanese girl, there was a Turkish girl who liked literature, there was Dutchman who said the Marshall Plan was blackmail and recoiled in disgust when I pointed out the American flag on his coat that he’d somehow never noticed. After I left England, I could look at a map of the world and it just wasn’t very abstract to me anymore.

I didn’t care too much that I was a virgin back then. I didn’t really worry about it. I remember the first time I went to England in June of 2006. I went with my father. His grandfather came to America from England just before The Great War, only to join the U.S. military and go back to Europe to fight shortly after he arrived. We were only going to London for about four days, but it seemed when I was snuggling with my girlfriend the night before that it was going to be much longer than that. I remember it was raining viciously right next to us when I said goodbye to her in my garage with the garage door open. I kissed her on the lips and on the forehead and on the cheek, and she hugged me, and I told her I wouldn’t be gone long. I knew I was going to miss her, though. I just wanted to keep hugging her for a while.

There were other times like that with her. I drove to her house during exam week in the fall of 2005 to give her a huge cup of ice cream from Coldstone. She was wearing a hoodie, and strands of her hair were floating around confusedly in the air, and she had her glasses on for a change. I wondered if she had showered at all that day, and I thought she looked stunning when my headlights glowed on her face. She was a Lutheran and sometimes I liked going to church with her. I also liked the time we carved a pumpkin and the first moment I told her I loved her and that one evening when she bought me a 12-pack of Fresca and showed up at my house with it. We could sit in my basement for hours just doing homework, hanging out. We could do stupid things like slow dance outside in the street. We could get McDonald’s and eat it in my car and just talk for a while. I held her hand while I drove her home from voice lessons every week. I thought a couple times that fall that it was too good to be true, that it would someday all be gone. Once I asked her if she ever thought about breaking up with me. She said she never did. But now it’s 2012 and it’s been gone since the fall of 2007. I made lots of mistakes. We both changed a lot. It went away. Neither of us would want to date the other ever again. And yet this distant past is valuable to me in some strange way, and I know it’s moments like those that matter most in life.

“Isn’t it amazing that we are just forcing ourselves with our feet across this terrestrial body?” One of my best friends asked me this as we moved ourselves down a path in the woods in the middle of the night. It was January of 2012. We walked for hours. We were somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, in the vicinity of one of its hundreds of billions of stars, traversing the Earth, together as friends on a journey without a destination. I was a collection of electrons, protons, and neutrons. I was a complex society consisting of trillions of specialized cells. I was a brain telling one foot to move in front of the other. I could feel the cold nitrogen and oxygen molecules hitting my face and rushing into my oral cavity. I loved my friend and I was so happy to be talking with him, walking with him, experiencing with him. He was smoking a cigarette. I like cigarettes and I wanted to steal one but I figured I’d wait until we got back to his garage. My ears could hear the leaves rustling now and then. I thought I saw a little girl standing in a bush, but when I walked cautiously closer she disappeared. I thought I saw a knight riding a horse in the distance, but he vanished as well. I was alive. I was thinking and I was feeling and I was sharing, communicating, hallucinating. We were walking across this beautiful planet, with all its trees and people and water and birds. I was amazed.

I am a human being. I spent Christmas of 2008 with my friends in a Berlin youth hostel. We went to the cathedral together on Christmas Eve. We went out for my birthday the day after Christmas and I threw up and thought I was going to die; I’d seen it in the movies. They laughed at me, they took care of me, and a hand was on my shoulder. I was glad at that moment that I never actually went through with it and killed myself. I’d thought about it before – I’d had plans, visions, fantasies about it. There had been sharp knives and high-speed trains and fast cars and bottles of painkillers in my mind, swirling around, cutting off my consciousness and destroying me. But instead I was a human being in Berlin with my friends on Christmas. It was all so simple in a way. And yet I was amazed.

I was in Munich a couple months later, in February of 2009. I was about to set forth on my first experience traveling alone. And in the next couple months, I would visit Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Romania, and many other places alone. But at the moment, with my blue 70-liter backpack dangling from my shoulders, I was waiting at the train platform for an arrival. I was looking through the crowd with my eyes. And then I saw my mom, who hadn’t seen me in 6 months since I’d moved for the year to Germany, smiling and almost crying, walking quickly a bit ahead of my dad until she was hugging me, and then I embraced my father as well. I wasn’t dead. I was still a human being. I was with my mom and my dad, and we were moving ourselves with our feet around the city of Munich, running into parades and visiting a palace and eating pastries and taking pictures in front of the Rathaus.

It was a short, three-day visit. When they left, I was alone in an old, cheap, creaky hotel room the night before my 6 am train to Slovenia. It was the most alone I’ve ever felt in my life, and I thought for a long time about how much I loved my parents. I wrote in my journal for a while about a girl I liked at the time. I tried to fall asleep but the sheets seemed a little dirty and the mattress was too hard. I had known since my month in England how valuable it is to expand my world – but I know there are people I am connected to, family and friends who will always be more valuable than my mythomaniacal travel dreams, who will always make it worth it to forge ahead in life when there seems to be no other point to anything.

The State Department website warned me not to travel to southeast Turkey in the summer of 2010. There were Kurdish militants there – terrorists, Islamic extremists, murderers of Westerners, car and bus bombs, roadside bombs, firefights between Turkish soldiers and insurgents, poverty and theft and danger. An old roommate of mine had told me you’d have to be an idiot to go to southeast Turkey. He had spent a couple weeks in Istanbul, on the other side of the country, where he learned all about how dangerous it was in the Kurdish areas. “Forty thousand people died there,” he told me. “Forty thousand people. I’d fucking never go there.”

Van is a city in the deep southeast, almost entirely Kurdish. It was one of several cities I visited during my visit to that region of Turkey. I seemed clearly to not belong there, and everyone could tell. I was drawing the attention of Kurds all around me. They waved and ran smiling to me and made me take pictures of them and with them. Some of them invited me to sit with them at their shops, always giving me free tea, never asking me to buy anything or pay for anything. Some of them spoke broken English to me and said they liked Americans. They complained that, until recently, it had been illegal to speak Kurdish.

A group of them latched onto me. “Maybe they’re Kurdish militants,” I thought. But I stayed on with them. There were about ten of them and not a single one of them spoke a single sentence of English. We sat for countless hours together drinking tea in a garden. They took me with them to the mosque when it was time to pray that evening. I waited for them outside, and when the ritual had ended they took me with them inside. They introduced me to the imam and we shook hands.

Somehow I agreed to get into a car with them. They drove me through increasingly dark and unlit streets. No one was saying anything to me for a while because no one spoke English. I started to wonder if I had finally made the ultimate, fatal mistake. I could imagine them taking me to a basement somewhere and decapitating me and putting the video on the Internet. And before I knew it, we were indeed in a semi-basement where they closed all the blinds of all the windows. I sat on the couch wondering if they had poisoned the Coca-Cola they handed to me.

We ate dinner. I was the guest of honor and so they made me eat twice as much as anyone else. We played games all night. There was no alcohol in this pious Muslim household, but there were so many games. Someone got out a Turkish-English dictionary and we tried to communicate linguistically as best as we could. But we were all Homo sapiens; we had so many ways to connect without the need of language. Genetically, we varied only .1 percent from one another. We shared common experiences, common thoughts, common emotions and feelings, common worries and fears. We all felt love and compassion and sympathy. We all felt a yearning to be friends with each other, to socialize with each other, to get to know one another, to spend time with each other. And we humans didn’t need a common language to communicate. We didn’t need words to build the bonds we built.

They drove me the next day down Lake Van. They arranged for the inter-city bus between the city of Van and the city of Diyarbakir to stop specially for me along the shore. We took a ferry half-way across the lake to an old Armenian church on an island. We had a picnic with lots of fruit and vegetables in the grass, and we went swimming beforehand. We took countless photos with each other in front of the mountains around the lake. And while we waited sadly for the bus to arrive, they drew a heart in the dust on the window of their car, and they made me write my name in the middle of the heart.

The bus came to sever the bond between us, and after a series of hugs, I was off to Diyarbakir. But the bond was still there in my head, in their heads, in the thoughts that I – this intricate collection of electrons and protons and neutrons – was having as I sped down the highway.

I was moving across this planet, and despite all the barriers of culture and language and nation and religion, humans were humans everywhere, and the sparks of love between us made everything worth it.