Being abroad — away from my home, friends, family and school — for more than two months has given me some new ideas about the meaning of presence. The word now means more to me than thinking about how many days I missed lecture during the semester, or how to cure my fear of missing out: a newly coined term stemming from our generation’s obsession with social media.
My childhood best friend and I were talking the other day when she came to visit me from her studies in Spain, and she told me about the difficulties she was having being more than 4,000 miles away from everyone. She felt guilty for not being there for her mother who was going through a hard time, left out of memories her friends were making and flustered about missing preparations for her sorority’s recruitment.
I sat thinking about what I could be home for. My own mother, in the middle of a depression; the birth of my second niece just days before; my friends in Charlottesville attending football games and parties and my best friends’ 21st birthdays, figuring out my housing situation for fourth year and my abandoned extracurriculars. There’s a lot that ties each one of us down to Charlottesville.
To me, presence is about more than physically being in one place. The emotional aspect of presence and absence is largely a dominating factor, so much so that I can’t even say that I really feel absent. I know that I am still spiritually present, just not corporeally.
When it comes to family, I have lived apart from my siblings for about 14 years because of our large age difference. And like most of us at the University, I’ve lived apart from my parents for a couple of years as well. Yet do I ever feel absent from my family? Although we are all physically together and present only about once each year, does that make us any less of a family? Emotionally, we’re 100 percent there for each other, and communication is never an issue. We’re present — just on the other side of a telephone line.
I feel the same way about my friends, at least the ones who matter. I always knew that wherever I would be this semester, and whomever I would be spending my time with, a part of me would be back in Charlottesville. The people closest to me are thinking about me as I’m thinking about them. I may be missing out on making memories with them and experiencing more college life at U.Va., but if that’s the price to pay to be able to make my own memories in France and travel around Europe, I’ll pay it in a heartbeat.
I’ll have seven semesters in Charlottesville and just one in France. I’m going to live without thinking about what I’m missing. I will try to embrace each day because I know that next semester when I’m drowning in midterms like some of you are right now, I’m going to remember this exact moment sitting here writing this, probably willing to give up my first-born child to go back to it.
The people who care about you care about you no matter what you’re doing in life or where the world has taken you. They won’t change, and if you do, they will still love you for who you are. I don’t want to spend even an hour a day Skyping, chatting or calling friends from home when I have this beautiful French city right outside my front door. Sure, the distance is more than 4,000 miles, but to me it’s only a couple of plane rides away. The day I go home, two months from now, I’ll wake up in my bed in Lyon and fall asleep in mine at home, and that means it’s pretty darn close if you ask me.
Valerie’s column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at v.clemens@cavalierdaily.com.
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