Amy, Эми, Amychka

I had already crossed an ocean and taken a five day Midwest road trip spending a full forty hours in the car, and here I was trundling down on a slowly overheating bus to spend the last few days of my annual visit States-side in Washington, DC. I was on my way to see a boy from Texas who I had met in Kyiv thirteen months prior and hadn’t seen since.

It was, by most people’s standards, an absurd idea.

I met him in Kyiv, but since then I moved to the Republic of Georgia and summered in Poland before coming to Moscow, where I currently live and work. I have been living abroad for over three years now, and the more I crisscross borders the more my fingers get tangled up in this expat game of Cat’s Cradle. When I go back home to the States, people frequently tell me they are ‘living vicariously’ through me or that I’m ‘so brave,’ but life as an expat is basically the same as life at home. I work, sleep, eat, wait for the bus in the snow, deal with home maintenance problems, complain about your job, and count the days until vacation, just like I did in the States. It is not a sparkly unicorn-riding adventure across rainbow bridges, glitter bombs exploding a safe distance away.

The only thing that’s different is dating.

With dating in the States, the most difficult thing was meeting someone, or rather meeting someone who was serious. To be a single woman in her 30s in the States is to get excited about false starts, scrutinize crushes’ Instagrams, bemoan yet another ghosting. There is at least the feeling that something is happening there, even if it is just circling the drain.

To be a single American woman in her 30s in Eastern Europe is to be invisible, a trait that my middle-child attention-loving self has never been satisfied with. Expat guys in Eastern Europe tend to have a type, and that type is definitely not American women. When I have managed to wade into the terror of expat dating, it quickly goes from bad to worse. Some of the misadventures I’ve had include breaking up with my boyfriend of three years only to have him turn around and date a Ukrainian woman the next week, a fraught friends-with-benefits-or-maybe-we’re-dating relationship with a good friend I managed to self-sabotage with my insecurities, and a Tinder date with a guy who turned out to be on the run from the US federal police.

This is why people live through me instead of living abroad themselves.

So to say that by the end of my time in Kyiv in 2017 I was a little jaded would be like saying Eeyore is a bit of a downer. And when I was in my favorite cocktail bar at 6pm after a stressful week one Friday last November and I heard two American guys walk in, I quickly dismissed them. I instead continued chatting with the bartender, who I trusted to more likely give me a free drink, and did my best to ignore the pair of burly, loud but easy-going, beer-drinking Americans in my cocktail speakeasy.

They hadn’t totally ignored me, though, and as I tried to slip by them on my way out one turned to me and said, “Hey, we noticed your accent.”

Yes, it’s definitely my accent that stuck out in Ukraine.

I ended up staying and talking with them for almost an hour, though I kept my coat on and politely declined their offer to buy me a drink. I had decided I would give off friend vibes and friend vibes only. So I don’t know what it was that prompted me to give them my number. I think I justified it to myself by believing that I was helping them navigate Kyiv (the poor guys had been drinking at the bar in the Hilton and had only just stumbled upon the world of Ukrainian craft beer), but I couldn’t totally ignore the spark of interest from one. I shook it off, totally burnt out from a bad summer/year of dating and said good night.

But the next time we hung out, he showed up with donuts. And the third time he maneuvered us into a conversation with a drunk South African man on the various locations where the rugby World Cups have been held. And the fourth time he finally kissed me, in the bar where we met, and I smiled as I told him I really couldn’t be seen making out by the bartenders at my local.

He had two more weeks left in Ukraine, and we spent a lot of that time together. Happy times are the least interesting to read about, so I’ll skip most of that. I did realize that we would be the most ironic couple. He would be happy to stay in his hometown and work all the time. I can barely sit still in my favorite cities and I desperately need the promise of vacation. He is the most private person I’ve ever met and I – well, I’m writing about my dating life on the Internet. But still, there was something there that I needed, despite a fast-approaching departure date and slim possibilities of a future.

We both had tickets out of Kyiv on the same day, him on the first of three flights to get him home, me on a train for a weekend getaway to research cocktail bars in Kharkiv. We didn’t even whisper ideas of meeting up back in the States. But we kept in touch, we texted and tipsy called each other. We said we missed each other.

And thirteen months later, I was finally setting out on a trip that had been confirmed just seventy-two hours earlier.

I was hoping that the trip to DC would give me clarity. The last year has been full of relentless nostalgia for our time in Kyiv but also innocent anticipation about our possible reunion. I was hoping we would have wild fun. I was hoping it would be fireworks, an undeniable tide of feelings, a testament to me that it was time to come home and settle down.

Well, DC isn’t really a wild fun town to begin with.

And it was fun. It was good fun. But it wasn’t like in Kyiv. Something felt different – did we laugh less? Feel more comfortable with each other? Didn’t listen to as much country music? I wasn’t sure. After a year, could I even pinpoint what that difference was, if there was one? I’ve come back to story ideas that I started months or even years prior, and I never write them in the same way as when I began. So was he different? Or was it just the strangeness of reuniting with someone I hadn’t seen for so long?

But why shouldn’t he be different? I may have moved through half a dozen countries since we last met, but in many ways his life has changed more drastically than mine. His career and life has been shaken up in extreme ways. But I’m still teaching, still navigating the very small ELT industry, making the moves I should be making.

Even his face seemed different from how I remembered. Or was it just that I had always seen him in a baseball hat and in his new job in DC he had to wear a suit?

Our context dictates more of our identity than we would probably like to admit. My very name changes as I go from place to place. I am Еми Рейчел in this part of the world to the point where I feel a sense of glee making online purchases, as if I’m using someone else’s money. Then one time in Georgia when I was introducing myself to someone new, the guy I had been seeing for a few weeks looked at me in wonder – “Is that how you say your name?” In Dagestan everyone I met insisted on calling me “Emily.” I even went so far as to correct one woman’s spelling of my name in her phone, but she just looked at it and said, “Oh. That’s how you spelling Emily?”

Travel inherently gives you a chance to reinvent yourself — or become more of yourself, if that’s what you wish. It’s not always a dramatic or even conscious decision, but every time you meet a new person you have a chance to start anew. And when you live abroad, you meet a lot of new people.

While maybe we can acknowledge its influence on our moods and even personality, how often do we examine how our circumstances change our behavior? How have I acted differently as I’ve traveled through the world? There were decisions I avoided in Singapore that I finally made in Ukraine. There are other choices that I had in Ukraine I might have handled differently if faced with them later, when I was in Georgia. Regardless of the fact that as I get older I get ‘wiser’ – would I react the same way to the same choice whether it was presented in Seoul or Mexico City or Kabul? What about Washington, DC? And can I trust anyone I meet in one place if we move to another? What about myself?

After the end of my long-term relationship during my first year abroad, I have dated (or tried to date) in almost every country I’ve lived in. And sometimes I look back on those relationships and wonder who I was, to make the choices I did, to get involved with someone who told me they didn’t believe in love, to pick a guy at the bar based on his tattoo, to let myself believe promises from someone who’s been known to break them. Maybe I’m willing to take chances. Or maybe I’m just desperate. Or maybe I’m changing things up so much that I don’t even know what I want – and even if I did, could I demand it of someone I’ll only know for 6-12 months?

That’s the problem with being an expat. You’re constantly shifting, and so is everyone around you. When one person is always moving closer as the other is sliding away, you’re never able to see all angles of a person. It requires a stationary point to focus and examine a situation from all sides.

It was foolish to think that I could get a full answer from those three days in DC, but they were all I had. And at the end there was part of me that knew, yes, the man from Texas that I met in Ukraine might influence me to move to DC, even if being with him wasn’t exactly as I remembered. It wasn’t him in his new context that made me hesitate, but me.

At the end of four years as an expat, of knocking down my life and rebuilding it so many times, of traveling in Asia living off savings and my boyfriend to building a sustainable career by myself in Eastern Europe, of yo-yoing between seeing the worst and the best of people, the States would be a wild new context for me.

Maybe that is the conundrum that we serial expats, or anyone, faces when it comes to settling down. It’s a decision to cultivate, not just create. On your own, you can do anything. But the act of committing to any relationship, with a person or an employer or a city, requires making a lot of decisions. What you will do and won’t, how you will treat others and yourself. Will you be honest or manipulative, loving or demanding? Will you be all of those things, and will you be consistent enough for people to know you? Will you be kind? Will you really care about others? Or in the end, will you still always choose yourself?

Settling down will not be a huge change in lifestyle for me – I will still travel, still seek novelty, still look for different perspectives. But the choices required of me are, in essence, a deciding of who I am. This – this is the version of myself that I want to be.

And who would I be in Washington?