Home no longer feels like home

I stand at the departure gate in Germany  with a heavy heart. Just the thought of going back to reality doesn’t seem so promising at this moment. The long 9 hour flight and the 5 hours of waiting for my next connection is plenty of time to adjust to the thought of being back. No matter how much I try, I can’t seem to find anything positive about getting back.

I survive the long flight and hope to breeze through Immigration, however,  staring at the stoney faced officer for 40 minutes while I stood in line, made me realize breezing through was a highly unlikely scenario, specially taking into account the current political situation here. Despite the Immigration Officer saying ‘welcome back home’, I don’t feel very welcome at this moment. The 10 minutes of interrogation on where, why, who I went with and what I did, doesn’t make me feel at home, it makes me feel like a visitor, in the place I have adopted to be home.

At the end of the 10 minute interrogation, I had so much I wanted to say to him, but I held back because orange is not my favorite color plus writing this from a jail cell didn’t seem too tempting.

I walk in circles at the airport trying to kill time for my next flight, only to notice that due to the weather my flight has been cancelled. After hours of going back and forth, they decide to put me on a flight that is landing at an airport 2 hours from where I should be. Fortunately I have some friends who agree to pick me up from there.  The waiting begins, the plane is on its way, the plane is here, the plane is having technical difficulties and on and on it goes. So almost 8 hours after I was supposed to leave, we finally take off.

Just when I thought that I had finally faced the worse part of the trip, I am told that they forgot to load my bags on that flight. Maybe I should just take a flight back to some other destination, since coming home is taking off to a bad start.

As much as I would like to say that my days got better, it seems it just kept getting worse.  My friends had driven my car for thousands of miles making me have to replace things in it. All my mail has been returned and on and on it goes.

As always when I feel overwhelmed with things all I want to do is go run. Fortunately I always carry  running gear with me, because I know that no matter what happens, a few miles on the road has a way of making me feel better.  I run past my usual haunts, including my old apartment and my favorite coffee shop, which makes me nostalgic and reminds me this that I used call this home. Right now with everything that is going on, it is going to be a while before I feel that I am home.