I have found myself wondering, “was it a mistake? Was it foolish to take that wild leap into the expat world back in the Fall of 2012? Even if it wasn’t, was it a mistake to dive back in, at the deep end this time, in Fall of 2014? Should I have settled down in America like a responsible adult? Is it time to do so now? Is it time to finally quit trying to scratch ends together from the meager paycheck for an unfulfilling job in a country you hate? Is it time to move on, or rather, move back?”
-This author, in an entry written from Beijing, three years ago today
"He's on his couch for the news at ten./
He'll see those places that he's been'/
and when a brother falls, there's a part of him that does too."
-Trace Adkins
So...
It's been about a month and a half since I wrote about my first month in Germany. I'm not going to bother listing off complaints about the nightmare of navigating this country. I'm not going to bother listing off complaints about the bureaucratic little desk gremlins running it with seemingly no goal in life other than spreading misery. I'm not going to bother listing complaints about how finding an English-speaker here is even harder than it is in China, and people tend to get offended if I ask them "Sprechen se Anglische?"
In all fairness, I have found that last seems to be less true when I am able to get to Cologne or Dusseldorf, or any major city, than it is out here at the goat farm that time forgot.
In that month, I have gone from "I'm just trying to save lesson money and get home," to "according to Rathaus, I can't go home yet because I don't have a passport entry stamp," to "now Rathaus says I can leave and wants to know why I haven't yet." I have managed to travel around Nordrein-Westphalen a bit (Cologne Cathedral was nice), hiked across the border to Belgium (it looks a lot like Wisconsin, weirdly enough), and even managed to squeeze in several trips to Rotterdam, Netherlands (the most amazing city I've seen in Europe; it is to this continent what Shanghai is to East Asia).
By the time the dust settled, my teaching firm was still in ruins and I still had to accept it was time to change something. It has been a trend (and I don't believe in fate or luck and don't set much stock by numerology but this one so far has held true) that years ending in 2 have been years of transformation in my life. In 2002, I graduated High School, thus beginning the military/paramilitary phase of my life. In 2012 I took my first overseas trip (Shanghai; a trip prompted, unsurprisingly, by a woman) and discovered the expat life, which prompted me to get a TEFL and launch the teaching/traveling phase of my life. Around June of 2022, as I sat in my apartment in... uh... Romania (I actually have to stop and think what country I was in at what point this year), I came to realize that this phase too was drawing to a close. I began to consider that it might be time to go back to the US and take a job I've been considering (because of the pay) but dreading (because I did it before for a short stint and hated it): Over-the-road truck driving. As I was preparing for this, an unexpected -and far more appealing- opportunity arose and it seems that, as of this coming November 4, I will be returning to Texas to help my father and stepmother open a bookstore.
...And thus, my world-traveling days are likely over.
To be honest, I can't say I'm nearly as sad about that as I would have been a few years ago. It was on one of my several trips to Rotterdam to visit a young Ukrainian woman who I had not seen since a few weeks before the Russian invasion, walking along the Neuwe Maas and gazing out at Willemsbrug (Red Bridge; the one in the picture is Erasmusbrug, White Bridge), with Glen Campbell's "Galveston" playing in my headphones
(I still hear your sea waves crashing
While I watch the cannons flashing)
that I realized I'm actually looking forward to going back to the States and settling down. At the beginning of this year I was beginning to call Ukraine "home" and was enjoying the life I had fought to build, and the fact that that life was finally coalescing. The Russian threat was already on the horizon, but I wasn't worried. I was sure Russia's president had enough sense to know unleashing a war upon a population that was largely sympathetic to him was a moronic idea. Surely, Putin was smarter than that, right?
The year since then... (long sigh) ...it's been rough. I haven't spent 90 consecutive days living in the same country since I left Ukraine on 1 March. I don't think a week has gone by without receiving word of a neighbor, employee, or former student who has either been killed, seen their home destroyed, or buried a child (or older sibling, in the case of several of my former students), all killed by Russian rockets, all in areas nowhere near a military or industrial target, all while Tass, RT and their faithful stooges in the West insist Russia is only targeting military targets. I have talked on Telegram to young women who used to be teachers in my company, who I had been looking for since the war began, only to find scarred and traumatized shells giving accounts of being held in Russian captivity for weeks on end and raped by more than 50 men repeatedly. Two of my former employees are pregnant, and neither knows which of their Russian barbarian rapists is the father of the child in their ravaged womb.
As for me, I've watched the videos of carnage coming in, gazing at the ruins of the city I called home, keeping survivor's guilt at bay by telling myself "not my country, not my fight," and blasting Springsteen and Sabaton in my headphones at top volume to drown out the whispering voice that says "oh, but we both know that isn't true, don't we?"
One hundred fifty meters from my apartment; I used to buy groceries here twice a week because their selection was better than the ATB next door. The shoes on my feet right now were bought on the second floor. The rose petals and candles I bought for my girlfriend's Valentine's Day gift did as well. The sandwich shop that used to be where the blast crater now sits was the only place in Industrialnyii that served a decent Greek salad. Destroyed in May by a short-range Rocket from Russian positions 2 km northward. Nearest Ukrainian military asset: 12 km.
The zebra-lane circled in red is where I would meet with my girlfriend when I picked her up for lunch after she finished her classes near Gorky Park (about a twenty minute walk down the road to camera-left). The entire square is a monument to Ukraine's hard-won independence after centuries of Russian occupation. Destroyed early in the war by a high-precision missile fired from Belgorod; celebrated on Russian media as a "victory," over some imagined form of "Nazi-ism" that is somehow manifested by Ukraine's celebration of its independence. Nearest military asset: 8 km.
Because, in the words of Van Halen, This is home... This is Mean Street." Because...
...this was home.
This wasn't like China, where I always knew "I'm just passing through to make some money before settling somewhere else." This wasn't like the US, where I spent years looking around and saying "this isn't home; I was just born here." Here, in Kharkiv... here, on the farthest eastern edge of Eastern Europe, on the doorstep of the withered and dying remnant of the Genghizid Hordes of old, this was a country where I had actually managed to build something: a business... a home... a life.
...And, this has been the year I became a nomad, wandering aimlessly around Europe, never owning more than I can carry with me, because all of that was gone.
And now I'm moving back to the country where a faction of the political party I've been a proud part of for my entire life, tries to pretend this is perfectly fine and that the subhuman animals who did it are just "defending themselves" against imagined "NATO aggression," or just "taking back what is theirs," or whatever excuse they've been fed this week, while the opposing party hands Ukraine a few table-scrap weapons from outdated scrapyards and then admonishes them to "show restraint" in defending themselves and "avoid escalation," while expecting to be praised for this supposedly "brave" show of what passes for "solidarity" with Ukraine.
Yes, I realize "Kremlin" is misspelled.
All I can say is thank God the Ukrainians are better fighters than the Americans are, and are managing to do more with those hand-me-down weapons than my lotus-eating countrymen ever could.
But me? Well, I'll be settling into small-town life in the thriving, super-cosmopolitan megalopolis of Nacogdoches, Texas (population: one university, two badgers, a fox, a dozen head of cattle and about a quarter of a squillion copperheads), debating complete morons on social media (it's hard to find an American voter who isn't in that category) and pretending that the fight for the country I wanted to call home is not still raging, a hemisphere away.
And, somehow, I'm okay with that.
I... shouldn't be.
I know I should feel guilty; cowardly.
But as forty approaches, as the leg I nearly lost to the primitivity of China's doctors in 2019 starts feeling like it's twenty years older than the rest of this battered body that I've treated like a stolen car, after going a year without being able to call any place home while the home I had chosen burns, after spending the year before that fighting to get back abroad while America railed against its own idiocy and its idiocy finally won out, after spending the seven years before that in China, where every God-damned single day was a nightmarish last-stand against a constant tsunami of the absolutely Lovecraftian mix of bureaucracy, oppression and incompetence that comes from some kind of neo-Orwellian vision conjured up by a Lewis Carroll character's evil twin on acid...
...somehow, somehow, the idea of settling down into a quasi-normal life ANYwhere, is impossible to resist. I have always felt like my life was exciting enough to be worth the hardship, and I suppose in my twenties and early thirties that was true. But the reality is that as I look back upon the most, eh... (chuckle) "interesting" year of my life in a long time, I am beginning to feel like I'm just too damned old and tired for this shit. I think I'm ready for the quiet life I was running from back in 2012.
I'll keep spreading what I have seen, what I have heard, what I know and everyone seems to want to deny. I refuse to be one of those 'poets [who] don't write nothin' at all, [who] just sit back and let it all be.' But for the man who chose "Remember your Homeland" as his screen name...
...it's time to go back to it.
So I'm leavin' for the last time, honey. I'm never more to roam.
Gonna pack my bags a little heavy this time, gonna head my ass back home.
-Charlie Robison