The August night before I left Eastern Europe — left my ESL teaching, my alternate universe — it was completely unbearable in Budapest. It was so hot and humid all you could do was lie on top of the sheets and hope for stupor. My cheap guesthouse made the situation worse, if that were possible: I got the room in front, facing the roar of traffic on Rákóczi út, which sounded as if it were the only road in the entire city, with every car, truck, bus, and tram parading past, a constant stream of clatter.

You could either open the door to the “balcony” — carefully turning the half-broken handle so as not to incur a charge for its replacement — letting in a nonexistent breeze, and then lay awake listening to the sounds of machines. Or, you could swelter in muffled silence, your torpor broken only by the excited yelps of French tourist boys as they left for the clubs at midnight.

*****

Freezing in the winter, sweltering in summer: Budapest. The first time I saw it, snow melded with years of exhaust (which I thought was the buildings’ natural color — some exotic stone — until my friend Ildikó told me it was just the layer of grime that author Slavenka Draculić talks about as covering all of Eastern Europe) to make everything gray, reflecting the gray January sky.

I was on my way to Romania to teach at Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca, flying into Budapest before driving across the border for eight months of what no amount of guidebooks or Google searches could prepare me.

My most vivid memory of Budapest is of people looking, looking, looking; hungrily staring at the fancy shoes, software, and modern kitchen appliances displayed in shop windows; looking as if by eyeballing hard enough, they could levitate the products right through the glass and into their half-filled grocery bags.

*****

I am trying to write about my feelings upon returning to Seattle, and what keeps coming up is STUFF. Has stuff become that defining for us, for me? Is it that important? A missionary on a Romanian train once spent a rapturous half-hour talking with me about clean, modern goods and houses. “Isn’t it great?” he asked, clearly savoring this memory of the West amid tours in Romania and Africa.

No, it’s not great, I said, and wondered how a man of God, who’d just agreed with me when I remarked that the lack of affluence in Romania teaches you what’s important, could be so damn materialistic. But maybe I should think again, because if you have to learn what’s important (that affluence in itself is not important? That material goods aren’t important?) from another culture’s poverty, you’re screwed. You can think and feel that so much more easily when you’re suspended in another country’s poverty. Like a little time warp, a bubble, from which you can leave at any time, but they can’t. Enforced voluntary simplicity is an oxymoron.

As many Romanians told me: Only Americans run without being chased.

But coming home seems to be about these things, these THINGS. The gigantic wall of chips in my neighborhood co-op; the immense vastness, the glaring brightness, the perfect coldness of Safeway — pristine and sterile in a way that, no matter how many white-coated babushkas carefully stack boxes into neat rows, Romanian markets (for they can’t be called “supermarkets”) can never match. Except for Billa, the new French grocery on the outskirts of Cluj, with its plastic-wrapped unblemished hard tomatoes, its plethora of canned goods, dog food, glassware, stationery — even exotic peanut butter, which my students had never heard of — along with frozen meals, manufactured chocolate chips, a big-box store that sells everything you never knew you needed, all in one place.

And what is it about bigness that seems to say “West”? Bigness denotes so many things: We are affluent enough, it says, to occupy this huge plot of land, to have a huge parking lot (parking lots are almost nonexistent in Romania) to go with it; we are affluent enough to stock this vast space with goods, but also affluent enough to leave space, to waste space on big aisles, to not have to cram every inch.

Our prosperity is in the air we can leave empty; we are rich enough to throw away a certain amount of food that will spoil because there is simply so much here (in order to stock a Safeway, a percentage of waste is certainly built into the budget). The farmers in the Romanian markets will bring their food back day after day until it they must consume it if it doesn’t sell (they have no budget for waste — the earth is not consistent with what it provides).

We are big enough, even, to provide free bags; their U.S. ubiquity guaranteeing them an afterlife in our garbage. But in Romania you must pay, so you will see those bags every day on the street, over and over, as they are used until they shred, not just for groceries but for everything. Draculić says they were used as handbags in Russia, and who from the embassy told me that the indicator for economic development was the amount of ladies’ handbags for sale? Or perhaps the indicator is how many shopping bags a store can afford to give away. Here in America you not only get them for free, but if you bring your own, they give you three cents back, which is less than what they charge you for one in Romania, but more than what you get if you bring your own there, which is nothing, which is expected.

*****

Coming back from Romania, traveling through Budapest and leaving for the airport at 4:30 in the morning (when it was exactly as sweltering as it had been the day before), I met the French boys in the kitchen, still up from their clubbing. They told me they’d come for a vacation in Eastern Europe and asked questions about Romania: What had I been teaching? Did I like it? Was it dangerous? I urged them to go there, but they seemed skeptical: it had a bad reputation. Everybody in Europe has heard it’s beautiful, but no one, it seems, actually wants to visit.

As my taxi sped through dark streets, I said my goodbyes. I was sad, afraid I’d never be back. I wasn’t ready to leave, not yet, and I was afraid of what was coming at “home.” Why? Maybe I’d felt so at ease and connected in Romania that I was afraid to unplug. I felt the loss of what I was leaving behind, and I wasn’t even off the ground yet.

I missed sharing stories in my broken Romanian; missed hearing stories in my neighbors’ broken English: Lily’s uncle in a Dej prison, Cristina carefully checking her gas meter so she would not use up her tiny government allotment of heat on a subzero January day, Andrei’s flashbacks of being arrested by the Securitate for the crime of having an Italian sleep on his couch.

I missed the market vendors calling Poftiţ, va rog? and the singsong cry AbTRONic, AbTRONic of the gypsy lady selling stomach exercisers on the corner of the piaţa.

I missed the unbelievable golden richness and shit and feathers of freshly laid eggs and the fragrance of tiny wild strawberries sold to me through train windows. I missed seeing sheep scattered across a far-off hill, the sheepdog with a sharpened stick at his throat, protection against wolves. I missed the flash of proud red tassels on prancing horses pulling carts piled with hay or scythes or logs or strong men dirty from the plow.

I was afraid that I was leaving a new self behind, that I would turn into the old one, full of fear. Full of worry and unhappiness. And who had I become? I had become someone who listened to the birds and watched the plums ripen and fall from the tree in my backyard. I had reached a stillness inside of me. I was happy and content.

*****

I was happy and content. I say that, and in my mind I see the Romanian fields stretching away from me on every side, with small suggestive tracks leading to…who knows where? Tempting the mind to adventure, following a solitary peasant with a bag in her hand. I see shepherds grazing their sheep on rolling hills, lost in their thoughts. I feel open, not bounded by billboards or highways. I feel the fresh air in my lungs and the blue sky overhead. I feel expanded, having muscles I never knew existed (dream or real?). I feel the classroom is a place where mutual discovery happens, where I am at last of use to someone. I want to hold a mirror up to all my students and say to them, “See how beautiful you are!” I try to do this and, although my face is not in the glass, I feel more beautiful too. I feel slowed down, undistracted. I feel no trivia has its claim on my attention. I feel more whole. I focus on what’s important: eating, drinking, talking to people, telling the seasons by the colour of the fields. I feel I am in the natural cycle, watching the nuzzling lambs and foals, the fuzzy green of small growing things, the ripeness of outstretched corn in the hot sun, the grapes. It is very sensual, this world, very seductive.

*****

Back in Seattle, though, I feel numb and strange. But, as Carolyn Forché says in her poem “The Return,” I am coming back to a world I never left. And now I am no longer visibly surprised to pay $4 for a tiny loaf of “artisan” bread. No longer wondering why there is no one on the street, why the houses are so pristine, so sterile and forlorn with their scattered toys but no children. The constant noise is no longer an assault on my ears; I no longer count the sirens or the jet planes flying low overhead, simply because I lost count two days after I got back.

Yet I still feel divided, neither here nor there. I begin to feel that it is a sin to expect someone to live abroad and then drop them back into “their” culture without further ado, lost and floundering. Unsteady on your feet, wobbly like a colt. And why is there culture shock only now, coming home, rather than going away? What is “home” and what makes it so?

I can’t assimilate here, but I begin to, even if I don’t want to. I start to be able to make small talk again, to not greet everyone with the double-cheeked Euro kiss that has resulted in awkward collisions and probably people thinking I was affected. I feel awkward at parties. And nervous when I go outside. It’s been one toe in the water and then two, then a whole foot. I still can’t fully immerse. It takes six weeks, I’ve heard. I’m in week five. We’ll see what happens.