last day. ever.

I don't know quite how this happened, but it appears that today is my last day in Germany.

Up until a week ago (ähm, pretty much from September), I was looking forward to going home like insanely.

I find that the idea that at approximately 3 pm tomorrow I will be in the good ol' US of A COMPLETELY unimaginable. I will never live this crazy comedy-series life with my host sisters again. I will never walk past the Döner-Laden on my way home from school. I will not drink coffee in the afternoon on my porch in those little white cups with the blue rims. I will not be able to hop on the bus or train and go wherever I want to. I will not be invited to those weird parties where people play drinking games and yell at each other in Spanish. I will not be "that weird American anymore," or "that American who learned German in a year," or even generally "that American."

This is impossible to comprehend.

I don't really have a real life here. I feel like I'm practicing for something. A lot of the time I find myself thinking, "Next time I will do this and this and this differently." But then... this IS my life!! And as embarrassing or awkward as some things are -- namely, how unmusical I am in comparison to my classmates, my American accent, and the fact that people think I am naive -- I will miss this, and over the last week I've been saying to myself over and over again, "Hey, it was worth it!"

To celebrate last-days-in-Deutschland, yesterday I went with Tang and Marlene to a bar in Pforzheim and had cocktails, and someone got very drunk, and we came home and Marlene taped her to the staircase with packing tape while I filmed it. It was a lot funnier than it sounds.

See you in America.