Last night I went to bed feeling miserable: profoundly sad and lonely. Granted, it’s partly due to the hormonal issue that sent me to the hospital last week and is hopefully temporary. But it is a fact that it took less of a month from my departure for my friends in California to forget me. And that hurts.
This morning I woke up still feeling quite miserable as I’m still sickly and it’s now been over a week that I have unwell.
But then two seemingly small things made a big difference for the better, at least to my mood.
One: my running coach wrote me a short, sweet text msg, ”Thinking of you”! That’s all I need really: a brief acknowledgement of not having been forgotten.
Two: the son of my host family, who’s the nicest 19-year-old I’ve ever known, asked me how he should conjugate my non-binary possessive pronouns in German (German is his mother tongue and the language we communicate in most of the time and it’s not only a very gendered language but also has cases and declinations). So we went to my computer and I showed him what I had found about the still-work-in-progress grammatical rules that are being made up for non-binary pronouns in German. It felt so good to be able to share this with him, knowing that he really cared.
When I met my host family over five years ago, the son was a shy 14-year-old whose sweet intelligence was often shut down by his stuttering. At the time, I was just a prospective tutor, a trusted neighbor, a friend of a friend, and someone who generally shared a lot with his parents. Then, I was his Science teacher for his 8th grade, when he was still very shy and awkward. When I saw him again last summer, after a break of four years and shortly after his graduation from high school, I could hardly recognize him: he had blossomed so wonderfully! As far as age, I’m right in between him and his parents. And with all my experiences as well as multi-faceted character, interests, and non-binary gender, I get along with all three people in my host family almost equally well: different parts of me are friends with the three of them separately, in very spontaneous but different ways. Yet the easy closeness and camaraderie between the son and myself touches me more, maybe because it’s always a bit surprising to me. He truly does enjoy chatting with me and we actually do have quite a bit we share: common interests in mostly fun and reckless activities. We talk as if we were at once siblings and buddies. I love it. It’s like the boy in me can wholly come out and interact with him without it having to be mentioned explicitly and yet being fully understood.
The Little Prince and the Fox 