The Long Awaited Return

I remember the moment I started thinking about leaving Albania. It was the Christmas of 2010. I was laying in bed when suddenly unexpected and unexplainable tears began to roll down my face. It was as if someone just told me for the first time that my life in Albania had an expiration date. Twenty-seven months had taken on various meanings through-out my service. At first it felt like holding my breath through the long West Virginia tunnels on summer trips between Ohio and South Carolina as a child – seemingly endless with a dubious purpose (my dad always promised this ritual ensured our save passage through the tunnel). Then, it felt like a slow march up to the Gjirokaster old town – slow, exhausting, but certain in the beauty of its outcome. And, eventually, it started to feel like a countdown to something unknown – like descending into a remote village after one of our many unpredictable hikes around Albania. However, until that moment, laying on my friend's divan in Korça, the end of 27 months never felt real. The next five months after that moment were some of the best of my life.

The anticipation of returning to Albania had been building ever since I left. I had what natives of my new adopted country call «чемоданное настроение (suitcase state of mind maybe?)» from the moment I bought my ticket in September. After a seemingly endless eight weeks at Middlebury College's summer Russian program, and another tediously long tenure of four months in Vladimir, Russia teaching English, I was finally returning to Albania. Despite the fact that I could sum up the preceding seven months in three words – longing for Albania – and for all the lavish exultations about the wonders of Albania I had subjected my colleagues to over the past four months, there was a private sense of doubt behind my words. Would it be the same when I returned? Or had nostalgia in Albania's absence simply been playing tricks on me?

Almost as soon as I exited my plane in Istanbul, my ears began searching for the sounds of Shqip. I knew it was premature. I was still walking off a plane full of Russians, and then I would walk through an airport full of people from all over the world, the unnoticable minority of whom would be Albanian. In anticipation, my ears held onto any sound that could be vaguely misinterpreted as Albanian. The many words that Albanian takes from Turkish made this easy to do. Eventually, I settled for taking a little satisfaction from hearing those words – tamam and hajde being the most common – immersed in an unfamiliar tongue.

Finally, as I boarded my plane to Tirana, I heard the sounds of Shqip. Sounds that only a few years ago were so foreign now comforted me and gave me a sense of belonging. I tried to catch every bit of conversation – a fascinating exercise among a group of likely immigrants from all over Albania. I felt like a famished guest sitting before the buffet with the dialectical richness of the Albanian language surrounding me. I could pick and choose the conversations to listen to like items on the buffet, but I couldn't quite enjoy or focus on just one because I was overwhelmed by choice and hunger.

A man approached who obviously had the seat next to me, and I jumped at the chance to ask, «A jeni ketu? (Are you sitting here)?» while pointing to his seat. If he had been American, I wouldn't have taken the time to ask. I would have quietly moved out of the way for him to sit down. But, this was the Albanian way, you take any opportunity to start a conversation. To my dismay, this did not spark the, «Oh, where are you from?» conversation I had hoped for.

Alas, the better my Albanian gets, the less common such conversations become. I eventually realized that Albanians don't instantly assume you are foreign because of a slight accent or small grammatical mistakes. With the significant differences between Albanian dialects, the poor knowledge of standard Albanian among some Albanians, and the number of Albanians born abroad whose Albanian is peppered with the influence of Greek, Italian, English, etc., Albanians are on some level used to hearing different versions of spoken Albanian. I sat through the rest of the plan ride listening intently, nervously waiting for the right time to say something, much the way I had during the first months of my service when I was not yet confident in my Albanian. It was strange to be back in such a situation: you think of a sentence, but gain the courage to speak only in time for the appropriate moment to have passed.

Meanwhile, all through-out the plane people were standing around talking, joking, arguing – activities Albanians have perfected. It is cliché, but I thought to myself, «Only on a plane full of Albanians would everyone clearly ignore the «fasten your seat belt» sign and crowd the isles to chat with their friends.» There was a sense of warmth that inevitably came from the fact that it was all so familiar, but also partially from my conviction that my soul belongs among people as animated and lively as Albanians.

The leg of the flight that covers little Albania is almost unnoticeable – an intimation of the unfortunate reality that Albanian remains relatively unnoticed in the world. Hence, the plane always flies low enough within Albanian territory to see the thin clouds hovering over the jagged mountain tops that seem to belong somewhere much further from civilization. The romantic feeling of these mountains is intensified by the fact I have climbed some of them. They aren't anonymous mountains. They are mountains that defined some of my greatest memories. More than once my fate was determined by their curves, cliffs, and caverns. As the plane approaches Tirana and makes its final turn to land, you get a panoramic view from the sun-reflected sea just north of Durres all the way to the snow capped mountains speckled with old villages, castles, mosques, and churches. It is an unforgettable, but now familiar view on a sunny day like the one I arrived on.

When we landed, my stomach was in knots. Later, Moza would point out that I was biting my fingernails, a nervous habit I had never noticed myself doing before. My projections would meet reality momentarily, and that private dread that my Albania had existed only in my imagination was swirling through my head.

Waiting to deboard and go through customs seemed to take years, but then suddenly, I was walking out from behind the glass doors that separate the waiting area from baggage claim. There, a mass of people waited like paparrazi, hoping that the next person to walk through those doors would be their loved one – one of the many Albanian immigrants living abroad. Although 99.9% of those people were disappointed that I was the person coming through those doors, two important people were estatic that it was me – Moza and Jurgeni.