Zurich Bound

Theo and I are going to Zurich next month. I cannot imagine what it's going to feel like to land at that familiar airport I've landed at so many times before. Will it still feel like home? Will it not? What will it feel like when I get on the little underground train at the airport and we begin zooming along toward customs and baggage claim and the flip book style movie of the Alphorn players and Heidi pops up on the walls of the tunnel, and the sound of the yodelers and cowbells fills my ears? Will I cry? Probably.

When Coco and I left Zurich to move to Minnesota, it was all so rushed. We really did leave without saying goodbye and it's been killing me ever since.

Somehow, we managed to get through last year, and then we made the move to Spokane, and slowly, the dust has been settling. Not too long ago, toward the end of the summer, I saw a friend post about the Zurich Writers Workshop on Facebook and I really wanted to go.

Of course, it's a terrible time to go! J and I are both still unemployed and looking for work, and despite the airline miles we had from our time in Zurich, I was worried that traveling would affect my unemployment. So I gave the Unemployment Office in Minnesota a call, and it turns out that traveling to attend a workshop and network with editors and publishers is completely allowed and won't affect my unemployment at all. Well, there you go. Nothing is holding me back.

Theo and I are going to Zurich. We're really going. I'll be attending the Zurich Writers Workshop and networking during our stay. I'll get to see my beloved friends, Theo is going to meet his baby friends whose mothers and I shared our pregnancies. I'm going to visit our old neighborhood, stroll through its streets as I once did with Coco, shop at our old grocery store, mail J and Coco a postcard or two from our old post office, walk by the lake, breathe it all in, arrange to visit our old apartment and give it a big hug. I'm going to do all this in the hopes of saying goodbye, of letting it go, of moving on.

One way or another, if we are to move forward in this life, I must do this. I hope that being there, I will realize that I am back where I belong being in Spokane. I hope that I will remember all of the reasons I believed Zurich was never a long-term possibility in the first place. Because I sure can't now. Is our life there all gone? Is it still there? Is there any hope of touching it or claiming it once again? There is only one way to know. Away we go.

Zurich Airport photo via Airviation. Tiefenbrunnen photo via Martin Strobach.