Crossroads

I've had this anxious feeling in the back of my mind for a few days now and I think I'm finally realizing what it is. I am at a point where I can decide to really throw myself into this experience and only speak french to everyone and really just try to assimilate...or I can talk to my housemate in English and skype with my friends all the time and write these blog entries. I don't feel comfortable here because I know I'm a stranger and I feel like everyone else knows it too. I know that if I just gave everything up - Skype, Facebook, the blog, everything - I would start to become part of this sphere; this moving, Parisian, market, shopping, metro-riding sphere. And I would fit in. I feel like whereever I am, I'm thinking of home and everyone around me can just feel how different my thoughts are, how they're tainted with English and it marks me. When I talk to strangers here, they're even stranger because we don't share anything: country, language, ideals, morals. They are French and I'm not trying to be. I am so afraid of letting my other world go that I can't even find a happy medium. I'm creating my own little English sphere around me wherever I go in this world and it's hindering me. I have a chance to start from scratch in a completely new place for three months and I'm not taking it. I'm looking at this as just another long term assignment that I need to get through, not a once in a lifetime opportunity to be French for three months, before returning to who I was. What am I afraid of? That this new life here might be better? It's not real though, it's like...I'm playing a virtual reality game until December 18th when I take off the game helmet and I'm back in the real world and I'll get that feeling you get when you've been running on a treadmill and suddenly you get off and the world seems to be moving so slowly around you. I'm afraid that if I let myself love Paris and assimilate, I'll hate Boston. I'm so afraid that I'll want to stay.