I went and then came back again. What do you call it when you're getting off the airplane in a place that's so familiar and everything's the same down to the dust on the car picking you up? Because it's the same thing you call the train stop that's yours on the return journey and the four flights of stairs to where you live right now.
I've been thinking a lot lately about vocabulary and its limitations, but mostly our own inadequacies in wielding it. How our words shape our world, and often we are using the wrong ones.
It was nice to be in Alaska (home?) (back?). I remembered, briefly, who I was. That if I want, I have a wonderful place to return to. That maybe I wanted to. That maybe all of the things that seem to matter in such an intense and present way right now are not worthy of the heartache they are causing. But aren't they?
The last two years of my life in Israel felt like a dream during those weeks I was in Alaska.
Except then I returned--4 flights and 3 continents and 2 days and 1 lost suitcase--and now my trip to Alaska is starting to feel like a dream. Like was it only two weeks ago that I was in Value Village with Valerie? Was it only a few days before that when we were making enchiladas and watching She's the Man? And with the quickly evaporating sense of A-Very-Real-Place-Where-I-Just-Was also goes the confidence in familiar surroundings and faces that I felt so fleetingly.
If coming implies a beginning, and going implies an end, and "coming and going" means a temporary middle, where are we all at right now with our lives and our verbs?
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