You can tell a lot about what’s going on in a person’s life from his or her Facebook status updates. They’re like diarised fragments that, when pieced together, chart an epic journey through an episode of life. And from those Trinis studying abroad, the fragments come pointed. Take this one from a friend of mine whose literary dexterity is exemplary and skill at simile, unsurpassed. She’s doing her PhD thesis in Europe but only just arrived at the painful realisation that she’s no longer a UWI student capable of consecutive all-nighters: “Lord, ah fed up. Ah jes fed up. Ah feel like ah get beat with ah pot spoon.” It was something to which the rest of her friends could relate. Not the pot-spoon licks. It was the physical and emotional ache of going through the motions yet again, at a time when our bodies and minds are no longer capable of any and everything.

An unedited sample of Facebook statuses from erudite Trinis at foreign universities from Boston to Bonn reveals comparable angst, as well as the loneliness, hunger, nostalgia and incredulity of the journeys upon which they once so willingly embarked (names are withheld to protect from further embarrassment):

“Someone heard my Trini accent and asked me if I was from Africa.”
“Oh lord. I jes want tuh wine!!!”
“My feeble little Caribbean constitution longs for warm weather.” 
“Ah want meh bed!!!” 
“That’s weird...Did not know it was possible to rain and snow at the same time!” 
“OMG!!! I miss real blasted food! I making pelau tomorrow, oui!”
“Nothing like finding a housemate passed out in the corridor to wake you up.”
“WHY GOD, WHY?!!!”
“(Name) is at the European Career Fair and apparently was supposed to wear a suit, not Converse.”
“Man, I feeling to eat cascadoo.”
“(Name) enters campus radio station and witnesses a bitter argument: ‘You guys think I’m weird because I talk to my video games but nobody hates Jason and he talks to his cheese.’”

‘Vagrant’ look
For the past ten months, I’ve received many e-mail and Facebook messages from Trini students past and present recounting experiences both amazing and agonising. One, in particular, from a Trini freshman in Canada, was heartrending. He had asked if the loneliness would ever end, asked me to remind him why he made that drastic decision for a dramatic move in the first place. Doubting even myself, I’d replied that it would get better. But just last week, I was reminded that, like the cascadoo that would never come, loneliness never strays far despite the acclimatisation. I got sick, sick real bad. I live in the midst of Boston’s medical area, known as “the best place to get sick,” yet I had no clue which was sickbay and which was sanatorium. Not that I could even bring myself to reach one without calling an ambulance for “the biggest belly pain ever, serious, no lie, it hotting.”

Loved ones were mere seconds from reach by phone, yet their arms could reach neither to comfort me nor to go to Walgreens for me. Eighteen hours later, I forced the nausea down and ventured outside to seek out precious pharmaceuticals. Little did I know it had rained and snowed at once that day. I slipped in my Converse not once, not twice, but thrice. As I boarded the train with the same sweat pants I cold-sweated in since the night before, dishevelled hair and days-old stubble, the train operator looked at me—and he visibly shirked. I had got the “different” look before, even the “alien” look, but the “vagrant” look was new.

‘Experience’
At some point later on in life, I’ll chuck this up to that thing we call “experience.” Maybe I’ll even laugh at the memory. Right now, though, I waiting for that train operator. The move is never smooth, the transition never seamless. Whether we’re first-year students or PhD candidates, the selfish move we make to better ourselves comes with a kind of sacrifice, disquiet and cathartic pain of which only those who have done the same would know. One amenity of which we can boast today is communication technology. Facebook—that Internet menace with its time-wasting, news-macoing Farmville addicts—is a universal platform on which we can be ourselves.

In our solitary apartments, we feel free to be as silly, frustrated and naive as we are to these new experiences of rain/snow mix and spontaneous desires to wine. A journey would be but a drift if there weren’t turbulence. The experience is, indeed, embarrassing, painful, stupid, crazy, uneasy and lonely. Yet as long as we maintain course to our desired destination, not even the hottest belly pain would matter in the end...although one might feel afterwards like one were beaten with a pot spoon.