Creative Writing On Goodbye Spain

Leaving Spain was an immediately bittersweet experience for me. I knew, as I stepped on the plane, that I would never experience anything like my time in Spain again; even if I came back to visit the people I had met and the places that I had seen, I would never be in the same place in my life or the same mindset as I was when I was living here. When I first left the United States, I was at a loss; I didn’t understand what I was doing, where I was going, or how I was going to live in a place like Spain. I was worried about my grasp of the language, and my ability to make friends and meet people.
These are all, I believe, completely normal things to worry about when someone packs up their life and moves to a new place for months on end, and I understood that when I left. However, I completely underestimated the transformative power that living abroad would exert on me. Even after a few weeks of living in Spain, I felt as though my whole world view had shifted. When I first got there, everything was new and foreign, but by the time I was getting ready to leave, it was my old life that seemed foreign.
Moving to a new country forced me to adapt. When I moved to Spain, I did not have a choice about whether or not I wanted to adapt to the lifestyle in Spain, or whether or not I wanted to speak Spanish regularly; I had to do these things to survive on a daily basis. As I got on the plane to return home to the United States, however, I realized that I suddenly had a choice. As I said before, living in Spain was transformative for me in a few ways; it was up to me, as I returned to the United States, to determine whether or not those transformations would become permanent.
I was sad to leave Spain, but it was a different kind of sad. I knew I was ending a chapter in my life that I would be able to reread forever, but be unable to relive. I knew that the lessons I learned in Spain were significant, but that it was up to me whether or not I would continue to carry them through my life in the United States. Living in Spain is something that I can never regret; I am immensely thankful for the experience, even though saying goodbye was incredibly painful and sad.