Vapor Trail to Nowhere

This morning I got in a total huff over the communication hurdle I can't seem to get over while being abroad. When I went to France to study abroad, it was really easy to maintain communication because it was short lived. I made and received phone calls, left and got messages, sent and received emails, care packages and letters. All the while anticipating my return home. But, now it's different. I moved to Switzerland, entered the daily grind and there's no end in sight. Everyone at home is in their daily grind, too and when daily routines don't overlap it's very easy for lots of time to go by and feel like the distance is growing further and bigger and more pronounced.

Sometimes I start to feel like I have to solicit every bit of communication I have with people back on the other side of the Atlantic. In other ways, I know that I'm busy and doing my daily thing and that's what everyone else is doing, too. Being so sick and missing an entire week of work it was like everything just stopped. I was not busy or doing the daily thing at all. I had no TV, no radio, just the internet and a couple of English books and magazines that I've already read. Time slowed way down and all I could do was lie in bed and watch the occasional vapor trail of a plane make a line across the sky. I wondered if some of those planes were going to New York.

This morning, in my huff, I sent off an email to the people I miss the most haranguing them with mixed fonts, colors and text size for not being better communicators. Later I felt guilty. It's not about them, or their communicating. It's about my missing them and missing being around them and wanting to be able to share the everyday stuff that I now experience in a different orbit than they do. I sought comfort and justification in that fact that I'm still on the Earth and that the internet, cell phones and cheap calls have made the Earth small and communication effortless. But I'm living in another world from everyone I love and care about and that's just something I have to deal with.