Greetings from the Other Side of the Wardrobe

Two more days.

The rest of this week is just anxious packing and getting ready to go, the town cleared out, classes are all but done, and now we just wait. My shuttle is leaving Saturday morning at 5AM for my 7:30 flight (God help me) but at least I won't be alone. It will be kind of funny coming back to San Francisco with the same people I came with. I imagine it sort of like, oh hey. Sorry, I just blinked for a second and had the craziest dream I was in France for four months and did all this crazy shit and made friends with all these people and took all this French and it was really fun and hard and everything... What a ridiculous dream. I remember it being hot on the day I left. I have no idea if it was or not. That would be especially weird, I think, to come back on what feels like the same day. It reminds me of stories like Narnia or basically any story that involves people getting sucked into a portal to have an adventure for what feels like weeks, and then once they finally fulfill their mission, it's time for them to go home, and they realize they've only been gone an hour and the housekeeper is still looking for them! Yet they'll always have their amazing ridiculous experience in Narnia (or Wonderland/Neverland/Oz), where they can always go back if they need to. Where they have truly established a part of themselves. They can tell their stories to people at home, who may or may not believe them because talking lions! Preposterous! (And then there's like that one adult that winks at them and knows it really happened.) This whole experience was my getting sucked into a wardrobe, and I'll come back ultimately having learned important lessons about loyalty/family/home/duties, sometimes wistful for how sick it was in Narnia, but also happy to be home where we don't have to fight bloody epic life-or-death battles against evil ice witches. The entire Narnia thing is really something important that happens to them personally, individually, catering to their characters, and it's okay if the people in the real world don't understand as much as you might think (or in the way you might think) because the experience really wasn't for them. It was for you.

There is always a point in the story where time is up, and the characters have to go back home. And Aslan, or the Wizard, or whoever, is like, you have to go back! You've done what you needed to do here, established part of who you are here, and that will never go away. You'll always be the kings and queens of Narnia, you'll always have saved Oz. Wardrobe stories have a time limit. When your quest is complete, you have to go back, you're needed in the other world. You've kept the housekeeper waiting!

In all those stories, while they're in the Wardrobe world, the characters miss home and they miss their families and lives, even as they experience the magic and wonder of the magical world they got sucked into. There is a glory about both worlds, one that is always concrete and real, maybe not always as exciting, per say, but very much more real and rewarding in other ways, and the one that is always a ridiculous adventure, concrete in time but strange in retrospect, like a dream. I've won the battle against the White Witch, and all is right in Narnia again, the coronation happens, Glinda appears, Peter Pan takes the pirate ship back to London. I'm old now, but I'm about to fall back through the wardrobe, back where I was, but with this fantastic experience within me. There will be a shock of it, and perhaps wistful longing sometimes when things get boring or hard in the real world, but for the most part, it's going to be really wonderful to fall back out, into my own clothes and my own family and my own friends, back to the real world, where my character, enhanced by my experience in Narnia, is going to continue the adventure.


And truthfully, who knows? You never know when you might fall into a wardrobe again.