Spending Christmas in Istanbul
5,455 miles away from everything I know and love for the first time.
It’s been five years since I last lived in my hometown, yet this past week was the first time it really hit me that it wasn’t my home anymore, just a place I used to live and still love to this day. There’s something about the holidays that brings these feelings out. You miss not only the people within your memories, but the places themselves, and you long for it all no matter where or how happy you are.
These physical locations that you often grow up resenting as a kid become significant in ways you can’t explain with time and separation. I was consistently told this growing up but thought it crazy. Now I know. Such is life, I guess. Learning means doing and doing means going your own way.
Since moving out after graduating high school, I’ve never experienced this longing, at least not in this way. It was always easy enough to get back. Muncie, Indiana, the small, rural town where I went to university, was a three-hour drive from home. Houston was a simple flight. Tokyo, Bangkok, Hanoi — they were the start of my nomadic journey and far removed from any major holiday and thus benefited from the rose-tinted glasses that come from new beginnings, long dreams finally fulfilled, and mid-autumn nothingness.
Istanbul, however, was different. It’s been my favorite city and the most surprising, but it’s also been the hardest and loneliest by far. More than anything, I think, it’s been a city of contrasts, of great greats and low lows.
My writing career has taken massive leaps forward while my bank account has done the exact opposite. My mom and stepdad came out to visit and then left just before Christmas, making it my first yet probably not last holiday spent abroad without any family nearby.
This has been the biggest and perhaps only major tradeoff of hitting the road and moving abroad unsure yet hopeful and generally living a life of seeing what happens next a la Kerouac with a Macbook.
Of course, it’s all worth it when I consider the positives against the negatives. The math always adds the same upon reason. I’ve done and seen more this year alone than high-school-me thought possible in a lifetime. This makes a lonely Christmas worthwhile, but it doesn’t make a lonely Christmas less lonely.
The month of December has been a comprehensive embracing that the road is not the universal good I once thought it was. It has shown me that even the things we glorify and put up on the highest of pedestals have their drawbacks.
That dream job you’ve been dreaming of for the last five years just might be great and everything you hoped for, but it won’t be perfect. There’s always a drawback, always something that could be better. And that’s okay.
