LISINSKI: The Sun Also Setteth (or the City Abideth Forever)

I’ve already exhausted my one Britney Spears joke for the semester, but here I am at a crossroads.

The whole matter is weighed down with a grim awareness: perhaps for the first time in my life, this is really, truly the end of something. I graduated high school with some tears, anxiety and memories, but I left for Boston University knowing I’d be back in the auditorium to attend the same winter concert I’d played in four years in a row. I left Boston knowing I’d have to return for a semester to receive something tangible for the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve paid into BU President Robert Brown’s $1.1 million-per-year compensation.

But now, I genuinely have no idea when I’ll return to Paris or even Europe, and when I eventually do, I’ll likely be in a very different place in my life. I certainly doubt I’ll spend another four months immersed in a single city abroad.

And behind that façade — as if it were not disorienting on its own — lays the g-word, that ever-impending uncertainty.

How do I accept that this is coming to an end when it’s dominated my life for as long as it has? I’ve only been here for four months, but I’ve been fantasizing about studying in Paris for years, and soon that will be ancient history.

It’s never easy to accept finality, and it’s always been particularly hard for me. Up until an age I’m not comfortable admitting, I would cry at the end of family vacations. I still have a tendency to stop playing games immediately before the final boss or give up on a Netflix show in the final season.

But this is entirely, utterly out of my control. Time always has been, after all, but now it’s especially salient. Whatever I do, it’s time to leave this Parisian adventure behind and face the next great mystery. That winged chariot yields for no one.

Frankly, the process of preparing to leave has put me in quite an emotionally uncertain place. I’m all over the place. I waver between ecstasy and dread at the rapid rate of a teenager during a slow dance at prom.

Part of me is excited to see my family and friends, to indulge in the paragon of America that is Taco Bell, to sleep in a bed that is actually wider than the pillow on it. Another part of me is panicked that I’ve failed in some unforgivable way, as if I haven’t done enough in Paris and thus cannot leave properly yet.

In this way, I’ve failed to take my own advice. I idealized Paris and my semester here. I came thinking I would “find something” — or, as BU would have you think, “find myself abroad” — and as far as I can tell right now, I haven’t.

I still don’t have the next Great American Novel all written and ready for publishing. I still don’t know what I’m going to do come May.

Of course, that’s all on me, and it’s my own responsibility to find a way through it. I need to learn to accept life as it evolves. This has always been the case, and that is exactly why, when put in perspective, I can find value in this semester. I’ve successfully put myself in a position where I need to adapt.

As I’ve admitted before, I’m not a risk-taker, but absolutely nothing about this semester was guaranteed beforehand. It was an enormous step, possibly even the biggest I’ve taken in my whole life, to fly off to a new country in a new language without even a single already-existing friend by my side.

And here’s the truth that BU Study Abroad tends to hide from you: it’s really goddamned hard. Some days are incredibly lonely. Some days are overwhelming. Some days beat you down with everything they’ve got until you have no choice but to hide in bed, just like you do in Boston.

Being abroad is not four months of vacation. It’s not an adventure-filled romp across Europe. It’s not a fast track to becoming a writer or a singer or a better person (insert whatever status you’d like). It’s four months of life, with all of its highs and lows and the even-more common dull in-betweens.

What studying abroad does, though, is ratchet up your sensitivity to previously unattainable levels so that everything becomes part of who you are and every challenge is internalized.

Today, I mailed a package for my internship and had a conversation in French with the clerk about what kind of postage it required. The other day, I had a French discussion about executive action and race relations in America. Both would have given me anxiety in English six months ago, and now, they are just a part of daily life.

So, I owe all of my thanks to Paris, not for being an inherently special place or the mecca of American would-be writers, but for being different and challenging. I did not find what I expected to find here, but I found something. Those failures are still present, and I’m sure they always will be, but they’re damn sure more manageable today.

So if you plan on traveling abroad at any point, do it. Just go into it openly, and don’t fall for the typical aphoristic traps. You’ll get something out of it, even if it’s not at all what you plan and even if it takes time to see that.

But don’t worry — there’s still plenty of adventure and romping to be had wherever life takes you.