I recently discovered a word.
A strange word with a narrow meaning, but a word nonetheless. One that only few experience and fewer still will comprehend.
Rückkehrunruhe – n. – the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness
It strikes a chord. A dissonant seventh which resolves into a loving sixth. Because in this word we find every meaning of the adage, “Post-Tour Depression.” A wondrously awful experience which is seldom felt in the real world but is the entire world for those of us lucky enough to spend our summers on the road with a family of 149 like-minded individuals.
In few activities do you become as close as we did. Laughing together. Crying together. Fighting together. Rubbing people the wrong way because you said something with just the wrong inflection and we’re 70 days in to this circus show and home isn’t home anymore. The gym isn’t home. Nor the bus nor the cook truck. But the people. The brothers, sisters, and mentors who all come together to perfect 12 minutes of entertainment. Fleeting. Longing for one more run. Straining to understand how an hour can feel like 5 minutes and vice versa. Contemplating the next meal or the next stage of life or why that ant is crawling on my leg; how’d you get up here anyways I’m on a box? Failing to understand how the summer could be so long yet where did it go? How is it over? How am I going to an old town which is familiar which is the last town? With a bed and a school and a car. Without the paint and the music and the pain device.
I don’t think we could ever capture that moment again. The summer. Just one sweeping moment of redundancy and complexity and crisscrossing of a continent. The love and hate. Fear and wonder. The thunderous applause of the masses as the final note rings while the performers smile and tears are shed because, in the blink of an eye, it’s now over.
