After two amazing weeks in the Netherlands, it's finally time to return home. While I'm not looking forward to the overnight flights back to the States, especially when I'm flying into Salt Lake City, but I'm ready to get home and see my family. (And eat all the foods I missed!)
Looking back at my time spent here, there are so many things I will easily miss. I'll miss the canals, filled with lilypads and coots and bikes tossed in by angry exes. I'll miss the bikes of course, how easy it was to hop on and go anywhere, and the struggle of trying to get the rear key out. I'll miss all the sites, all the cafes, all the little places that make being outside the hotel room worth every moment.
The Netherlands is a country that feels like it was built to be lived in. It feels like a country that was built with the journey in mind, not just the destination, where the sights along the way are just as important as where you're going. Being back in America, it feels like things were built with the hope that they are used and loved and appreciated, not like they were built with the security in knowing that they will be used and loved. Sidewalks lay unused, bike lanes are filled with debris and drains, long stretches of roads leading past lonely buildings and cookie cutter houses with no one outside. It feels like you could go days without seeing a person, just driving around in a sea of un-personable cars with not a soul existing outside of them.
I think this is the hardest part about going home. Yes, I will miss all the big things that are most associated with the Netherlands, and I will miss the people I easily grew to love, and I will miss the trains and the trams and the buses. But the thing I will miss most of all is people. Going for walks, going for runs, sitting on a bench, eating at a cafe, walking along the canals, biking past in groups, sipping coffee in a train station, I could go on and on and on. There are so many communal spaces where people are able to exist comfortably without the fear of loitering or being shooed off. It feels like the most natural thing of all, to just be around people who are living at the same time you are. You'd expect it to be overwhelming, like being in a large crowd and swaying with the flow of the current, hoping you don't get sucked in the undertow. But, if anything, it's the opposite. By the end of the trip, you don't even notice the hundreds of people existing just like you are, they're just a part of life. Community, it's just a part of life.
Being home, it's easy to get swallowed up by the hopelessness the lack of being there creates. I can't help but feel stuck, dependent on my (expensive) gas-powered vehicle to take me everywhere, even though I love it so. I already feel my body sinking back into that familiar rhythm, moving from place to place without reveling in the journey. I'm taking extra care to notice the little things about the US that gives it its charm, and finding ways to bring a little Dutch back with me. I hope someday soon to visit the country again, even more to live there, but for now that remains to be seen. So, I will bike a little more, advocate a little harder, so that the people who follow after me will have a chance to experience that joy here.