... but we're not talking about that.

As my stay here in Germany is winding down a certain phrase is repeated continuously in every conversation I have with people and it goes a little something like this:

"Well, when I get back to the US..."
"BUT WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT!"

 Most of us refuse to acknowledge that there is this pending doom hanging over all of us within the next couple weeks. So we just don't talk about that, but I'm afraid right now I'm going to HAVE to talk about that.

 This last week everyone from what I've called, "The Wisconsin Horde" have all been moving out. They are the big group of about 40 people who are all from Wisconsin that randomly showed up at the beginning of January. I was friends with a few of them, but especially Kelli and Maggie who live on my floor. Maggie and I spent a lot of time out on our balcony drinking wine or tea with too many lemons. Kelli is the die-hard Packers fan who loves to cook and bake though she seems to think that she fails at both. The three of us have spent a lot of time just sitting on the balcony talking and talking. Maggie left a couple days ago and Kelli was supposed to leave yesterday, but she missed her flight because the cables between Marburg and Giessen (the only line to the Frankfurt Airport) was broken. So, she's crashing with me for the night which makes me happy because I was already missing her. She told me that as she was sitting on the train watching the castle disappear she started crying like a fiend and an old german lady asked her, "Alles in ordinung?" And Kelli replied through hysterical tears, "NEIN! ALLES IST NICHT IN ORDINUNG!" And apparently the lady was so freaked that she changed spots. Kelli is definitely one of the sweetest people I've ever met. And when she showed up at my dorm this morning she brought me a chocolate croissant. She just left to go biking through the canola fields for the last time and I'm staying in to clean my room and get some things in order for when I leave in the next couple weeks.

Cleaning is such a dangerous... DANGEROUS thing. It is one of the biggest memory joggers and is not a safe thing to do when you've been denying the inevitable. I started with the safest thing: the sink where I only had a few memories of binge-tea drinking with Spencer from last year and as I poured bleach into the basin I remembered cleaning the mold from my windows in -25 degree weather.
The real rough stuff happened when I started emptying and sorting my desk drawers. There I found stacks of maps from all of the different places I had been, the map of Marburg I never used, old train passes, bus reservations for Prague, boat tickets for Finland, trolley stubs, U-Bahn/S-Bahn maps from Berlin, and my RyanAir flight ticket stubs to Scotland, Ireland, and Estonia. I just continued to throw them all away (with the exception of the maps and the boat tickets now using as bookmarks), but I couldn't bring myself to throw away one particular thing I had found.

I rediscovered my first train ticket from Frankfurt to Marburg. As I stared at it I saw all of my former anxieties, fears, and anticipations. I knew then that I would come to love this place, though I had no idea exactly how MUCH leaving Marburg would hurt me. Even right now I'm just staring at the screen with no idea what to write as the rain pours hard against my window in good Marburg fashion. I'm so terrified to go back to the U.S. Aside from my usual fears of having to talk to the Haus Frau to check out, getting my boarding pass printed, getting to the trainstation, and then getting to the airport... I'm terrified of how I'm going to feel when I get home. I know there will be that surge of excitement to see a few people again, but how long will that last? I know that I wont be able to communicate everything that's happened to me properly and that basically nobody will quite understand what's happened to me. I'm definitely certain that my family and friends will want to take a frying pan to my face every time I bring up Marburg or Germany, but that's all I can relate things to.

It's going to be strange only hearing English with the occasional Spanish thrown in here and there. In Marburg it's always German, but since there are so many study abroad students we also have a lot of Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hungarian, Italian, Slovanian, Slovakian, Russian, Polish, Czech, French, Romanian...etc.

I guess I wont know how things will go down until I get back to the U. S.

There we go. I talked about "that." I guess I just needed to get it out there and now I can go back to cleaning and then prancing around drinking by the Lahn and just enjoying what little time I have left in my favorite place.