I remember how it used to feel.

Bet you didn't expect to hear from me again, huh?

Well, I'm not back in Rome. I'm still in St. Louis, still at SLU. In fact, it's been over 10 months since I left Rome (10 months and one week to be exact). And in these past ten months, a day hasn't gone by where I haven't thought about Rome, missed something about Rome, or been thankful for Rome.

That's what brings me back here today. The more time goes by, the more I realize how much I never wrote down about Rome and how much I still have yet to say.

When I started this blog, it was mainly to keep friends and family members updated about what I was up to over in Europe. As time went by, however, it morphed into something that I also did for me. If I'm honest, I have really missed blogging since last December.  So, I've decided to continue blogging about my experiences in Rome and Europe, but just for me this time.

Who says that a study abroad blog has to end as soon as you come back home? In fact, I would argue that it shouldn't end. No longer being in a place physically doesn't mean that you aren't still there on some level emotionally.

As Natalie Goldberg (and Hemingway) say, it takes time for us to process these types of things anyway:

It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can say is, ‘I’m madly in love,’ over and over again. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in the fall and return to the lakes in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a café in Paris. ‘Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.'

--Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones 

So, here I am--to reflect, to remember, and most importantly to write about Rome and Europe again. Probably rather sporadically, but I know this is something that I need to do.