Loose Ends, Baby

BLOG #4

Despite writing this two years after the actual events and consequently having limited insight to 19-year-old Nat’s mindset, I know that on that second day, in what felt like the middle of nowhere, I was feeling a bit sad.

The ten days before my flight to U.S were hectic. I was to leave around the 14th of August, my year at first uni finished in July and I had a family holiday wedged between the two that meant very little time to see everyone before I left. Squeezing in everyone I wanted to see involved considerable cross-country travel and a massive coffee/pint shaped hole in my finances.

Just to make it more fun, I also had to figure out where I stood with my girlfriend at the time, who I was on a ‘break’ with at this point I think. Everyone’s been on a ‘break’ before and at some point, everyone finds out that a ‘break’ is just a lazy and drawn out break up. It’s like organising to see a friend but then never setting a date or a time and then not actually seeing your friend. To complicate it further, she joined my family and I on holiday that year. We just did the very English thing of just ignoring it, meaning the situation wasn’t figured out, and then I left the country for a year.

But then I don’t think I ever really left anything ‘done’ when I left. I never said ‘bye’ to any of friends either, it feels so serious. It’s always ‘see you soon’ or ‘I’ll give you a call’. It takes away the effort of admitting you don’t know when you’ll next see that person and making that last chat way more important. I therefore left having not really thought about leaving and still with that feeling that everyone will be around next week- mentally I was very much not on my way to the middle of nowhere.

That’s until I waved off my parents, my mum published the obligatory Facebook post mums do when their children do anything, and I walked on into Manchester Airport’s always lively security. It sunk in as I stripped for the x-ray machine and I became very anxious. I began thinking of the actual significance of leaving for a year and asked myself why I was doing this - I didn’t know anyone where I was going, I hardly knew where I was going in the first place and suddenly this intense loneliness began to beat up my stomach. All this was made worse by the fact I looked stupid in my Mum’s Facebook post.

Luckily at this point the humiliation of turning around and chasing my parents into the car park because ‘I don’t know anyone there’ massively outweighed the effort of making some new friends. Nevertheless, as I took my seat on the plane, heading for this ‘new chapter’, this cool ‘adventure’, I embarrassingly took comfort in the fact I could come back at Christmas if I wanted to. You always have this vision of the film characters or bloggers saying how excited they are to do something new. To fly to Paris and buy a bookshop and have a coffee with a French man. The reality of moving away is that it’s hard. So, after I flipped through that magazine they give you on planes, let the obligatory enormous person take their set next to me and kicked my shoes of so that everyone could get accustomed to the smell of cool wave Doritos early on, I went to sleep.

My parents had grilled me on the exact step by step process of getting a connecting flight, they didn’t need to as airports make it very hard to fuck up. There’s a board with your flight’s time and location on it every two metres. Atlanta (where my connecting flight was from) is the world’s largest airport, imagine the number of billboards I saw that day. I literally had to get a train to my terminal.

It was then I got an email form Nebraska’s study abroad advisor saying there was another English person… in the airport! I tried to call the attached phone number, but it didn’t work. I tried to text it, but it didn’t work. Eventually I got an email from Elise HERSELF:

‘I’m in at the gate. Wearing a blue jumper.’

Or something just as vague. I got to my gate, the only flight going to Nebraska for a few hours, and spotted Elise immediately as the English person in the gabble of Nebraskans waiting to go to Lincoln. Elise wasn’t wearing cowboy boots for start, but sat in a blue sweatshirt, short brown hair and loads of piercings.

I don’t really need to describe Elise further because I’m hoping that the rest of the blog posts will kind of do it for me. I got a fairly quick insight when, after the boarding staff announced that veterans could board, Elise, having not paid attention to this, became agitated with the static crowd in front her and took it upon herself to try and board, only to be turned away by the people on the gate.

‘Yeah they said veterans first.’ I helpfully noted on her return.