middle of the night hodgepodge

Some days make me wish I was in Coldfoot again.  The rainy, dreary days that would have been spent working and reading.  I miss sleeping in a tent.  I miss the sound of rain on my tent and I miss my sleeping bag and I miss living in Coldfoot a lot.  I thought I would miss different things this summer.  Like falafel and Sharia Al Sikeet and Safeway Shmeisani and my fabulous roommates, but I miss Coldfoot the most right now.  Is that weird?  I feel like it's almost insensitive to Jordan, but I'm sure I'll have Amman Aches soon because it takes a good few months to realize you're not going back.

I found 2.35 JD in the pocket of a pair of jeans the other day.  How have I been home for a month and this is still happening to me?  I thought that after, like, a week or two you're supposed to have things all unpacked and put away.  But it turns out there is no specific schedule to this, whatever this is, and even a month later there are weirdly painful pangs that are triggered by nothing and reminders from inane objects you thought would have been filed away weeks ago.

I posted my first story as editor this week.  Lakeidra wrote it (fabulously, I might add) and I took pictures.  It's about construction on campus.  And working on editing it and posting it was the most purposeful I've felt in a long time, which makes me think that I'm probably in the right place doing the right thing I just have to figure out how to be back here again.

It's almost-kind-of-a-little-bit dark outside right now.  I miss Ammani nights a lot.  I miss sunsets from hilltops and warm night air and weekends on Rainbow Street.

When will it start to get wearisome to read about how reverse culture shock is weird?  I don't know what else to write about, because this is all-consuming and I think about literally nothing else.

Honestly, at the moment I'm just waiting for my hair to grow back out.

A month ago...

Coming back is a process.

It was nice at first.  To see people, to speak constantly in English, to visit familiar places that were once taken for granted with a renewed sense of enthusiasm.

But then something shifted.  And I can't shake this unsettled, ungrounded, unraveled feeling that permeates every.single.moment.

I've been comparing notes with my roommates.  They all seem to be settling into America quite nicely.  But I can't help but feel like the place I'm trying to fit back into hasn't accounted for the new ways I swing my arms when I walk, because I am constantly bumping into walls and expectations.

No one asks me about Jordan.  But if they did I would tell them that I miss the man with the Egyptian granddaughter who visited us at the bus stop some mornings.  I would tell them that I was thinking about how a month ago on Friday I was browsing hand-made crafts at Souk Jara.  I would tell them that these days I unfold the entire sheet of directions just to see that Arabic is the 8th language they are written in, and I sit and patiently sound out words I do not know the meanings of.

I can't sleep.  So I watch movies with British actors just to try to lull myself to sleep on the waves of their differently pronounced words.  I put on mascara just to have something to do with my hands.  I read.  But I start in the middle of books now because I cannot stand beginnings anymore.

Lately, I've been thinking about Budapest.  About how the day before Deshani and I left, we sought out this Indian woman who threaded our eyebrows in the back of her shop, which was half liqour, half noodles.  About all the bridges.  About how those days were a juncture between two states of being.  About how neither Deshani or I were particularly interested in reading our map, so we spent a lot of our time lost.  About how it snowed on us.

At every intersection, I am learning how to be at home again.  But it is happening too slowly.  Everything that I cannot reach out and touch seems like a dream.  When once upon a time it was terribly, wonderfully, awesomely gritty.