Musings

Often late at night I stop and listen to the world around me. Despite the constant noise – my husband’s snoring, motorcycles passing on the street below, a lone siren in the distance – there is a sort of postmodern quiet in the unquiet, as if some majestic silence muffles the sounds of night. It is in these moments, when my life is illuminated only by a computer screen, that I forget, momentarily, where I am and how much my life has changed. But has my life changed? The sounds I hear are the same sounds that I could hear from my apartment on a busy corner in Nashville, the same sounds that might be heard from almost anywhere in the world at 1am.

There are so many things about this new life of mine that are no different from the life I left behind. I write, I play, I watch, I laugh, I cry, I shop, I love, I read. I can feel the autumn breeze from a sixth floor apartment in downtown Thessaloniki and be filled with the memory of a crisp fall night in Nashville. I have lost nothing, but I have gained a new perspective. My old world still exists, but instead of being chained and bound, it has become intertwined with my new existence. I no longer have to be afraid of looking back to see Medusa’s stony glare, of being frozen in place. Life is different, but the same, and that is no small comfort when you realize that home is seven thousand miles away from where it used to be.