Two Worlds Collide

Shannon and me on top of the Eiffel Tower

It's been over two months.

My ability to suppress emotions and thoughts has even surpassed my own expectations. When memories, or "homesickness" for Europe creeps in, I'm able to "replace" the thought with something else conscientiously, and suppress that memory. I find it somewhat ironic that it's necessary for me to do this with what are typically brilliant, amazing, and wonderful memories, but how else can I function? What amazing things lay beyond the limits of normal, if I recall even for just an instance that just beyond my reach? Universes might collapse.

Of course I never felt like the first ending, was ever the end. I've been waiting, asleep, dormant waiting to wake again from everyday life.

Shannon at Delices et Saveurs near
the north train station. Best Napoleons e

I'm no longer the person I was when I left for Belgium, nor am I the person who came back. I'm something else all together, someone who wonders what happens if I lot the monster out? What happens if I could somehow find myself transported far-far away, to do it over again? What if I could bridge these realities?

That would never happen.

Serve The City feeding the homeless at Gare Du Nord in Brussels.

But then, last Friday was Shannon's birthday. I had been planning a surprise for her for weeks. I wanted her to know how special she was in my life for giving me the gift she did the previous semester. I wanted to give her a chance to experience what I did.

So I took a chance.

I emailed her professors, got her excused, and got everyone in on it.

Then on Thursday, as we made our usual commute to UNCG, and instead of turning left, I turned right. I changed directions, I changed destiny, and we boarded a plane and left this existence.

The next day after we awoke from the flight, and we landed in Paris.

Just steps from Petillon Metro, we walked over to the VUB and Vesalius College.

We visited the catacombs, ate a mille feuille, we climbed the Eiffel Tower, we stayed with the Monks at a hostel, and we walked the snow covered streets of Montmartre.

Then I did the one thing I said I'd never do again. We boarded a Thaly's train for Brussels.

I went home, and Shannon was right there with me.

...and it was amazing, we were amazing...

This is the look Christie gave me after telling her one of my ideas.
I was reminded shortly after, some thoughts should stay inside
my head, and never come out.

We fed the homeless at Gare Du Nord train station, drank absinthe, visited the beer cave of Delirium, had an incredible meal of rabbit and choesels  (yes I said testicles), ate pita-durums and waffles till our eyes popped, and completely forgot that back home, the other us were doing homework, living a menial life, as European us giggled through the snow covered streets at midnight.


I was glad to be back. It was as if I never left, but I knew that come Monday morning, we'd be back on a flight to the U.S. I always go back, because that's what you must do, but in some parallel universe there's a version of me that remembered what I had chosen to forgot. The dream is what really happened, and somewhere in my brain is my true reality. But till I'm ready to remember, my mind remains a bunch of shattered pieces, a self-made purgatory that protects me from myself, and others, of what I'm capable of causing when two worlds collide.