Back to Lux

Wow. It’s already been 2 weeks of 2024 and I still wrote 2023. I can’t believe half the month flew by so fast. This is the most active long vacation I’ve ever had. All of my mental and physical energy were drained from doing and seeing so much that I always dreaded writing. Now that it’s all over, I dread going home and having nothing to do.

I took the RER from the Charles de Gaulle airport back to Paris. Just before, I had a nice sendoff for my boyfriend going back to Chicago. I was surprised at how well I had been holding up, but of course, it all hit me like a truck at the baggage drop. No matter how many times Camden said that this was the best vacation ever, it was so difficult for me to share that sentiment—not because it hasn’t been amazing, but because it doesn’t even feel like a vacation. Every day, we share incredible experiences and our lives are never boring. Traveling around Western Europe for the past two weeks when I’ve been living here the whole time has made it difficult for me to isolate the past 2-4 weeks in my head. Now that he’s gone, I am starting to recognize that it was only a one-time thing and the break is over. It’s sad to say that the happiest I’ve been here is when he and my parents were here. It feels really empowering to be able to show them around a third country abroad. Strangely, the only one I’ve ever really felt like I had a home in was when I studied abroad in London, which was also the shortest period of time.