A very small world after all

It was sometime after the second bar, sometime before the first round of late-night waffles, that we opted to cut through the side alleyway in downtown Brussels. And that was when they ran into each other.

Two high school friends from central New York, separated by college and real life and adulthood four years ago, reunited on a street in the center of Belgium. Of all places.

Eight weeks into living in London, such coincidences are becoming commonplace. First there was the Georgetown-educated restaurateur, who gave me a free glass of champagne when he learned where I was from.

Then it was my boss, who realized she studied abroad with my sister in Malta, so many years ago. And her boyfriend, who lives in the same sister’s neighborhood in Boston now.

At some point, pure coincidence bridges over into serendipity. I boarded a plane to Prague this week, only to sit beside a young American who went to high school with my roommate. I later met a Czech bartender who had just returned from visiting his sister in Maryland, and, as I sat down to dinner the next night, heard a familiar voice calling once again. My classmate.

I seem to belong to nowhere these days; I’m a visitor wherever I go. But wherever I am, there’s someone, unfailingly, who knows someone or something I already love.

Studying abroad was supposed to make my world bigger. I thought I was supposed to hop on a plane and spend four months awash in different cultures, seeing things that would make my perspective broader and my showers shorter.

There’s some of that, sure, as there always is when you get to stay somewhere like this for so long.

There have been a great deal of stamps in my passport, postcards sent westward and ethnic cuisines photographed, Instagrammed and eaten.

But the most striking discovery hasn’t had anything to do with the beauty of the German countryside, the thickness of Parisian accents or the way London looks in the dewy hours of the morning.

The most striking discovery is that the world itself is small.

As I wandered the aisles of a small grocery in Prague this week, staring helplessly at cheeses and crackers with labels I’ll never be able to read, I turned a corner to find myself staring at a shelf loaded with Uncle Ben’s rice.

I picked up the orange box and clutched it, suddenly wanting it more than I’d wanted anything I’d seen in a long time. Not for its taste, its price or its uniqueness. I wanted it because even here, halfway around the world, in another country and another language, Uncle Ben and his rice were still exactly the same.

So maybe we can go to every country, we can see the world, we can find new places to live and to love. And maybe at the end of it, we won’t be able to go home again, like they say.

Because maybe we never really do leave home in the first place.