Don't Let It End

London SkylineWith 4 more days left in London, I've had a lot on my mind. Of course finals have been at the forefront of that but the idea that I'm actually going back to New York after 4 months of being away is kind of crazy. The past 4 months have been some of the craziest in my life. What I got to experience while I was here are things many people never get the chance to experience and for that, I will always be grateful. Not only have I gotten to spend 4 months in London, but I've also had the chance to travel outside of London to Dublin, Amsterdam, Brugge and Paris. What I've gotten to do within London has be fantastic as well. I feel like I learned so much about myself and, as cheesy as it sounds, have changed. The changes haven't hit me yet but I think they will once I go back to familiar territory.
This blog helped me record what I did here and gave me the chance to reflect on it. I often have this problem of having too many thoughts in my head and I need space to pace around and sort through those thoughts. However, when your room is barely the size of a closet, that's hard to do. This blog gave me the chance to focus my thoughts about what I was living. It was nice to be able to read what was happening in other sites; it made the experience feel a lot bigger than just me. It helped knowing that people were having similar doubts and feelings about being in another country, despite the fact that we were all over the globe.
I don't know what going home is going to be like. I've had pictures in my head of how I'll react when I see my family and friends again for the past 2 weeks. I've been through a whole range of emotions from happiness to sadness to excitement to disbelief. And now, with 4 days left, I have a combination of all of those. After all this time away, I don't know what to expect it to feel like when I land at JFK. I suppose it won't help that I'll have cousins over the day I land who will want to know everything about my semester. I'm not sure if I'm going to be ready to try to consolidate this whole experience. The pictures I took will definitely help but they are only one part of the entire semester and I certainly didn't capture every little moment. But it was the little moments that made this different and those are the ones that are permanently etched in my memory and since they don't need to be shared, they can always be my own.
I've decided to leave you with some lyrics from Coldplay (fittingly British) from “Life in Technicolor ii.” This set of lyrics manages to describe London in a way I can't seem to:
“Won't you take me where the streetlights glow
I could hear it coming
I could hear the sirens sound
Now my feet won't touch the ground”