TheJourneysofTomorrow

Without any doubt, California must have been dreaming on that cold May night. Seven years ago, somewhere deep in the forests of North California, I was woken up by the sounds of shifting trees. My eyes took to adjusting to the pulsing light of our campfire.
Several guys wrapped in earth-stained blankets were still sitting around it. I could hear my host sister Bianca’s steady breathing behind me. I looked up at the star spangled sky. A sixteen-year-old Serbian girl who, several months ago woke up to a smell of plum jam from her
grandma’s kitchen and the dense, chewy texture of the homemade bread that crumbed under the fingers, when America was just greens and browns on the geography teacher’s map, was now taking the yellow school bus with brown seats with white, spindly tatters coming out of it and laughing at jokes about the DMV.
’How did I get here?’
I thought of my host family’s home. A shapely house with a wooden floor, a moss green roof and surprisingly beautiful stained glass doors. At night, one could see through them, far across the downtown and behind the gift shop that sold scented candles and moon-shaped necklaces, to the rising star of Walmart somewhere on the outskirts.
I remembered Santa Cruz, a trip a few days prior to camping. There was music in its streets. An old man with a violin, playing a tune that sounded so alive, so vibrant, as it intertwined with the commanding smell of the eucalyptus trees from a nearby butterfly resort. The fact that the eucalyptus was, in my eyes, now a tree and not a chewing gum flavor made me think I was doing something useful with my life.
I was happy. Somewhere towards the end of my stay, in early June, my best friend Monica and I were cleaning out her garage. As I felt under the table, my fingers met with something sticky, gossamer. An engorged black mother spider twitched frantically on her web that I had so carelessly touched. As both of us scuttled back in horror of each other, it had suddenly dawned on me – California, the orange, sunny, coffee – smelling California was now, after a year, my home as much as it was this Black Widow’s home.
Somewhere midway across the Atlantic, on the San Francisco – Frankfurt – Belgrade flight, I felt my eyes burn. I was flying home – from home. Though I already knew back then that I would not be able to stay in one place any more. Home was gone.