I have always had a hard time leaving home. When I was a kid I would have panic attacks when I’d go away to summer camp and I wouldn’t let myself have a good time until I heard my mother’s voice on the phone. When I moved away for college I made sure to make a home for myself, not in the dorms, but in other people who would not have my mother’s touch but would fill parts of me I didn’t know were empty. Washington is my home, in it’s precipitation is all of my memories and all of my love. I talked about leaving all the time, absent mindedly, but I always talked about forever. Or at least a long time. I wanted that distance, I wanted to be able to love these people and this place more but the web I had spun for myself and the beauty of it was entirely relying on my place in it. Still, I bought the ticket to France and I did it before most people in the program. I was ready.

It’s surprising what you’ll part with when you figure out what you want.

What sealed the deal for me was the architecture. I knew I couldn’t find those vaulted ceilings and reliefs in Seattle or Tacoma or Olympia or in the living room of my poorly made house. It struck me that though I was letting go of a lot (albeit temporarily), I would gain invaluable experiences and those were the experiences I truly wanted to pursue. It was the first time I was faced with the truth of what I wanted and I treated myself fairly by tearing myself away from home. For the first time my absence would be noted not just by my family at home who fed me spaghetti every birthday and brought me to church every Sunday (like good God fearing Christians), but my family in a town where a sense of “community” is a joke. Special people, all of them. My former family sent me off with hugs and well wishes while my latter family wished me luck with forties and drugs.

And then there I was waiting in the terminal, reading teen fiction, and eating caramels I had meant to save for my Homestay family in Rennes; across from me two children fought over an iPad while their mother stared deeply into her blackberry like if she bent down far enough she would be able to fall into the screen and away from the children whose voices were prepubescent and shrill. I looked around me quickly expecting to see someone ready to hold my hand from one family or the other but instead all I saw were my bags. I immediately became envious of the children in front of me. I wanted to be able to bring home with me, too.

I could not do that. All I had was a picture of my mother in my wallet and a Christmas themed bracelet that I hadn’t taken off in two weeks (and wouldn’t remove for another year). It wasn’t enough but at the same time it was too much, I mean, being reminded of what you’re leaving can break your heart. Even if it’s only for a little while.

But then it was our turn to go. I watched the airplane roll into the gate and my heart didn’t race. It stopped. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. I blacked out to flashbacks of the last time I was on a plane to Florida next to a German kid who wouldn’t stop eating and wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. Deep breaths weren’t helping, I was on autopilot as the people around me rushed to line up and sort their boarding passes. I froze for a moment forgetting the hectic scene around me to look outside at the Evergreens in the distance not swaying for the wind, black against the achromatic sky. My senses came back to me and I reprimanded myself for being so melodramatic, so removed from the bigger picture – I told myself the trees and the grey would be there when I got back.

And then I was up in the sky and the screen on the chair in front of me told me the plane was heading northeast and I realized I had never gone in that direction before. I flew over houses and my fingers touched the glass only to remind myself that I could touch nothing I loved. Those things were as unattainable as the clouds we were ascending through. Everything around me was clean, even the air. I had the option to be upset about so many things, (leaving always leaves the people I love a little bloody), but there was nothing to be done. My words would be at home, but that’s all that would linger. And that helped me go to sleep.

We landed in Iceland and then Norway and then Oslo. I wandered around each airport trying not to listen to all of the languages I didn’t know. I was in the air for a little over twenty four hours and when I finally landed in Charles de Gaulles and heard all of the words I’d been studying eight years prior to that moment, what I had been working towards became less of a concept and more of a paralyzing fear. I made a friend on the plane but she didn’t know any French, we shared a taxi ride into the city because I told her I’d let her stay at my apartment with Kerry. Forty euros later we were in the 10th arrondissement; she was trying to find the building where I was staying while I fumbled with our luggage and admired the night life surrounding us. Everyone was drunk and on a bike, all of the girls were screaming, “Attendez-moi!” at men four blocks ahead of them, it was one in the morning and everything was open like it was the afternoon. After finding Kerry and depositing all of my things in our room we immersed ourselves in culture by drinking overpriced mojitos under a heated lamp smoking the last of my American Spirits from back home. I didn’t understand what was happening around me but I didn’t need to. That first night is what I visualize when I think of relief.

The next day I was on my own while Kerry was in class. I wanted to go see the city but I’ve never had the best navigational skills. I got very, very lost. Strangely lost, seemingly perpetually. I stayed on the M11 until I had to be escorted off. I walked up the stairs of the metro, turned a corner, and ended up at Notre Dame. No picture does it justice, nothing can describe the magnificence of the glass, the stone, the light. It might have been the cigarettes or the fact that I hadn’t eaten but I think it might have been sheer wonder that fucked me up; my knees went weak and my hand didn’t leave my heart. Oh, my heart ached when my eyes traced every stitch of the dauphin’s robes, I trembled at the altar of St. Peter, I stopped breathing when I looked up and the rose window was staring down at me like the eye of God. Say what you will about religion or God but there is something holy about that place that dismissed the embarrassment of my earlier ventures.

I felt forgiven in more than one way. I was blown into the cathedral and my doubt was blown out as if the saints knew that my soul belonged there and not my mind.

I grew up in awe of stained glass. A little girl at St. Elizabeth’s church always tracing my fingers along the iron molding while the preacher preached. Art has always been my God, my religion. I had more than a spiritual experience. I’m still shaking.