Germany

It didn't start with a moment. It started with a field.

They don't talk about the small things you experience when you move. They don't tell you about the birds, or the bikers, or the beers the size of my head. They don't tell you about sunsets or peacocks or grass so green and so unending, it feels like living in a place that requires asking permission from nature to stay.

Instead there's the pointless things. The plane rides. The houses. The schools, and the money, and the translations. There's no poetry to practicality, no romanticism to rebirths.

During mass the priest once asked us what home means, and proceeded to tell us that it's the first place you experience the love of Jesus. I thought, That's bullshit. I didn't believe in the idea of a home. I'd had too many. Instead I believed in the idea of people.

So this moment, this moment that shaped me, was the result of what I've come to realize are a thousand different memories of a single small place. In a country called Deutschland, there was a village called Waldenbuch. And in a village called Waldenbuch there was a neighborhood called Wacholderweg. And in a neighborhood called Wacholderweg there was a field, and that field was my first steps into a life that I pounded with my tears, and marked with my soul.

So, again: It didn't start with a moment. It ended with one.

...

We spent three years there. Overhead was a bell tower where the bells rang every day at different times, signaling the passing of moments we would've otherwise ignored. Our schools were forty minutes away by bus, barely a half-step towards the sort of American lifestyle we had left behind.

I didn't have much in the way of friends. I had brothers. I had a dog. I had neighbors. I had a mind which chose the pursuit of books over any sense of middle-school normalcy, like TikTok or wearing ass-- pardon me-- booty shorts. I had an attitude forbearing awkwardness, and a countenance that pleaded to be befriended. I wasn't much more than the girl who was good at English, and the girl quietly trying as hard to be liked as everybody else.

But, ah. Moments after school were times to take walks. I went down a short and winding street that bled into patches of longish green grass and wildflowers, past the tattered barn where a small family of farmers made their home, up the beaten dirt path and gazing out at the forest a few hundred yards ahead, and the trees covering hills in the distance, hills that separated us from other villages like ours-- nestled, natural, abundant, beautiful.

I must have watched about a million sunsets on the top of the highest hill, watched as orange dipped into the sky and pink slowly rose up from the tops of cottages, and the air grew chilled like it was gently urging me home.

I must have read twenty books, walking or sitting in those fields, and polished off a dozen poems after my rambling footsteps drew me to the shade of a crabapple tree I never succeeded in climbing, occasionally moving aside for the horses and their riders who crested in front of me.

When I got a crush on a boy, I walked furiously fast along the path, playing Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" and trying not to connect the dots between the love he was singing about and the boy I was embarrassed to think of. And when I went home, the story I spit out on my front porch was the result of half-chewed ideas about red hair the color of sunsets, and professions of romance I didn't dare hope to hear.

I was there when my neighbor's dog tried to kill a stray and I threw a stick at her, yelled until my voice was hoarse, and dragged her away by the back of her neck until she bit me too.

When it was pouring rain and I needed a place to romanticize, I trudged out in boots and jacket and found a temporary pasture that had been erected in the field, filled with five horses. I stroked the flame-colored nose of my favorite, nicknamed him Bucky, and imagined he was mine.

It's strange to have a place where you've felt every emotion that can be contained in your little body-- it's rare as well. I was angry at my family and marched like a soldier until I had pressed the rage into the ground underfoot. I was miserable from a bad day and tipped my head back in the drizzle of a rainstorm, watching the silver skies echo the inside of my heart. I was happy when I made friends with a girl I had liked, and told the crabapple tree about it. The sun spilling through its leaves felt like a smile.

When we had to leave, I was there every day, ruminating on my home country, wondering if I could even call it 'home' anymore. I had visited and been unimpressed. I had watched the trees and grass through the car window, and wondered why nature in the US looked merely like it was playacting in the hopes that its disguise would allow it to live a little long, avoid being crushed by concrete and swept away by tar. By contrast, nature in Germany looked at humans and said, "Try me."

The last day came. The dawning moment. I'd been too frightened to cry for weeks, but I went up to that field again and watched everything I had experienced play out in front of me. A thousand thousand memories rustled through the brief seconds I stood there, until the weight of holding them back become too heavy, and I...

I fucking collapsed on that hill with my hands to my chest, crying into the flowers, and whispered, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen."

Maybe not such bullshit after all.

I blessed all twenty books and dozen poems and every iteration of myself I had left behind in the fields. When we left, I didn't leave completely whole. I left tired, and worried, and a little drunk on something so potent and powerful it would've seemed like hatred, if it wasn't the same color as the sunset.