On missing things

I miss nights.  Specifically, I miss Amman nights.  And getting home from school wearing too much clothing because of modestly and collapsing onto our cold stone floors in tank tops waiting for the sun to set.  And walking up the hill to buy juice, like we did that one time.

I miss Arabish.  And I miss the small list of things I was responsible for in Jordan.  I miss Levi's class.  I miss talking about Arab politics (doesn't anyone care here?).  I miss reading Arabic on street signs and handouts and in the faces of strangers every second of every day.

I miss winter in Amman when it would rain almost every day and the streets would turn into rivers.  I miss being cold in Shmeisani wrapped in blankets watching chick flicks that our favorite movie man judged us for buying because he was a bit of a hipster and he always wanted us to watch his favorite foreign films.

I miss teaching English.  Even though most of the time I felt estranged and awkward and like I spent too much time sitting in the teacher's lounge not teaching.  But I miss being in the classroom with my ever-rotating cast of kids who I tried to coax into saying one or two sentences over the course of a few months.

I miss Hashem.  Oh my god, I miss Hashem.

I miss mine and Fathme's pink bedroom.  I miss our assortment of comfortable couches.  I miss our infrequent family dinners at home and I miss our hookah room that we never really smoked hookah in.  I skype interviewed for a job in there though.  Against the stone wall that probably made me look like I was tuning in from prison not an apartment in the nice part of town, and I knew that there was going to be life after Jordan I just didn't know it would get here so quickly.

Diary of a jetlagged traveling slightly mental 20 year old who just got home

I'm home I'm home I'm home I'm home.

And I woke up at 5 a.m., and I forgot I owned the red puffy vest I'm wearing, and my family got a new cat while I was gone and she is a monster kitten, and my brother doesn't use conditioner so my hair is a frizzy dried out mess, and the contents of my year abroad are spread out over the living room floor, and I'm home.

I'm not good at missing things.  I am good at moving on and looking forward and being excited about the future.  But I am not good at remembering and missing and thinking nostalgic thoughts about things that once were.  Maybe I won't miss Jordan too much.  Or maybe I'm jetlagged and slightly mental and tomorrow I will be so sad.

I forgot that in America you don't have to turn on your hot water heater and wait half an hour to take a shower.  I forgot that you can drink tap water and that lots of people in Alaska proclaim their individuality through vanity license plates.  I forgot that towels that were dried in a dryer are so, so, so soft, and how good honest-to-god real pepperoni pizza (not halal!) tastes.

But I remembered how to drive home from the airport, and I remembered to put on my turn signal.  And I remembered about the grey sweatshirt at the back of my closet, and I remembered where I put my cellphone charger 10 months ago.  I remembered to say "thank you" instead of "shukran."  I remembered what the good radio stations were.

It hasn't quite hit me yet, or maybe it doesn't hit you?  I've never done this before, so I don't know what to expect.

Almost the end

I'm about to leave and my life in Jordan is about to become a series of memories.  No longer a nuanced life of ups and downs, but snapshots remembered and retold to people only half listening.

I am ready to move on to Life After Jordan, but I am not ready to leave.

Because my Arabic teacher taught us how to make maqloobeh, and I spent an hour chopping parsley in the kitchen and when will I ever have that much time to spend cutting vegetables into infinitesimally small pieces ever again?

Because I speak this horrible made up language of Arabic and English (and Spanish sometimes when no one can remember the word in Arabic) and at home I will only get exasperated sighs and eye rolls for my enthusiasm about the word mnamanmat.

Because where will I ever find a roommate who wants to talk about Syrian refugees or the elections in Egypt as much as mine do?

My stomach ties itself into knots that I blame on heat and too much falafel but I think have to do with coming home.  A year is a longlonglong time to be gone.  Can you be a million things at once?  Because I am and I have no words to encompass all of it.

I am leaving more broken and more whole than when I left.  I am leaving with a renewed sense of purpose and a better understanding of just how lost I am.

I am a walking contradiction and at any given moment I could write a novel with the thoughts racing around my head.

I have asked too many questions in the past year, and I am not quite ready to resign myself to the lack of answers and return to my far away mountainous winter wonderland.

But it's almost the end.  And again, I'm leaving a place that became a home in such a short amount of time with a small amount of luggage and a perspective on the world that's been irrevocably changed.