Regensburg at dawn—the alarm on my cell phone is going off next to me. I had dreamed of home again, and the images are slow to fade as I wake up. This is the most difficult part of the day.

For a moment, I am disoriented. The street sounds here are different, and though they are faint, I notice the dissimilarity immediately. The smell, too inchoate yet distinctive, it is simply the smell of German apartment buildings. And before I have heard a single German word, my own language is displaced: it is still there, but it no longer envelops me as it does at home.

My dreams fade. What did I dream of? I cannot say for certain. There is just an emotional residue, a longing so deep it is not even painful. It too is fading, like the dreams themselves. By the time I have showered, it will be gone. Over the course of the day, thoughts of home—of my house, of Wesleyan, of family, and of friends—will come and go, but they will be different from how I feel in this instant.

I value this time, this feeling, the daily shock of waking up in another country. It will not last much longer. I have been to Germany before, and I know that I will settle in within a few weeks, and then waking up will merely be waking up again. But as long as each morning renews Regensburg for me, it is important. The longing, the brief melancholia, mingles with my excitement to be in Germany, even makes me consciously aware of it. I face the pleasant challenge of wanting to be in two places at once, and in these moments of waking, it is almost as if I achieve just that.

I am still in bed, and the feeling has almost passed. The moment gets shorter every day, the feeling less sharp. But however brief, it is still a moment of adjustment, of preparing for the day ahead, when language will constantly be pushed to the forefront, in class and out. I will understand some words and be mystified by others, and those I do not understand I’ll hear phonemically, as pure sound, and language will be made astonishing in that instant by its most basic components. I will relish the chance to speak English with the other members of the Germany program, and when I have been exhausted by endlessly focusing on speaking and reading and writing, by the sheer foreignness of everything, I will return to my bed, and it will be welcoming and familiar.

I get up and cross the room to stand before the window. Outside, snow is falling, softly but relentlessly, covering the cars in the parking lot, frosting the red tile roofs of the apartment buildings and small houses across from me and settling in the trees that dot the gentle hill rising out and away from town; I live here now.