For about three weeks now a student from Norway has been living with my family. It’s real odd, adopting a stranger into your daily life, and I’ve never had anyone who has been around me so much.
Joachim is my age, and will be a senior at my school this year. He made the soccer teams and is a damn good goalie. He’s fun to be around – but there almost never is enough space for me nowadays.
I’m sure he’s still not completely comfortable, having taken off and reestablished himself across the ocean with some strange family, but I’m a fairly ‘independent’ kid and sometimes I just get bugged when it feels like someone is just shadowing me.
Saturday I woke up around 7, came downstairs and had a real session. I was quiet and didn’t shower or eat breakfast. Around nine I could hear from the office that Joachim was awake, mulling around and cleaning his room, but he didn’t come out until around ten when I showered and then we had breakfast together.
The next day at church I said I was going to get a drink and ended up using the toilet. When I got back my sister pointed toward the bathroom and said that Joachim had gone off to look for me. I didn’t want to go find him! Thankfully he found his way back to me fairly quickly.
It’s more just because I like being alone as much as off with friends, but it’s been hard for me to make the adjustment from ‘independent’ (lone wolf) to run of the mill pack member. I’ve had to call friends over and introduce them to Joachim (which, by the way, is awkward) and I’ve even gone to some friday parties – the first since eighth grade.
I got the oddest feeling tonight as I was loading some of our clothes into the washer. Whenever I previously washed my clothes I just took everything and threw it in with a few cups of soap. But tonight when I threw in all my whites he said that he had put a red shirt in, and I almost took out the whites for fear of coloring them…
But I’m sure that this year will be a great one – and mostly all that will come out of having a few odd situations will be growth, maybe I’ll even take enough liking to the kid to go visit him sometime back in the homeland. This could always just turn into that seventies show, thirty years later.
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