Vol. 4: a ticket home

I've neglected this blog for the last couple of months, so a special thanks to anyone still reading it. I had my traditional wordy, rambling post written, carrying us from the morning I awoke on my own in Prague to the day I landed in the Birmingham airport at one in the morning, exhausted and without luggage, but unfortunately my Macbook's hard drive recently went ka-put, taking my precious InDesign, blog post and a library of music I'd joyously downloaded with it to the grave. Kala suuru.

So I am offering only the abridged version of the story here, partly because my rewrites always turn out sloppy and also because I've been recently blessed with the opportunity to share much of this story with family and friends in person.

Because in case you didn't hear, I am finally back in the States.

However, I am no longer in Louisville. We'll get to that in a moment. For now lets rewind back to the Czech-Inn, one of my favorite hostels in Europe, where I woke groggy and hungover to the sight of a strip a clean, bright sun filtering in through the thick curtains onto the dorm floor. I laid under my thick, Moroccan blanket for a few moments staring blindly at the spot before it registered: where Nichole's pack should have been was just a runway of empty light. According to my journal, I rolled back over, sighed and fell back into a protesting sleep.

When I finally convinced myself to go down for a coffee, I was more awake but no more enthused about my new reality; I was alone.

I stepped into the bright lobby, steaming mug in hand, and stopped dead: it snowed. I know no one will pity me when I say that it was the first (previously only) snow I'd seen that winter and it was only a quarter inch, but it changed everything.

Now, I know it wasn't actually the snow. I already had a new adventure booked, tickets to Ireland tucked into my planner, and still without a set date to return to America, my European bubble was existing firmly, wildly without an expiration date. But I'd gone to bed in one reality and woken to an entirely new one again.

For heaven's sake, how many times can that happen in a year?

Now separate from my travel mates, I was leaving the world in which Things Made Sense and entering a uniquely misunderstood existence. By now you've realized I have a tendency to be melodramatic, but in this case there is some reason to be. Since that morning, I haven't had a single two-way conversation about Niger. I can talk and talk and talk, I can write and write and write, but I can make no better sense of it. Anymore, it doesn't sound real to me, and I lived it. To those who have had no contact with that world, explanations fall abysmally short. The thoughts that cross my mind on a daily basis, those about Niger, about Djamila, about my loved ones there and the precious times we had, I must hold privately. They can't possibly register the way I need them to; I am alone. So, as I crunched my way through the streets of Prague to the airport that morning, nothing else mattered; I was alone.

The melancholy of it all did not wear away for the several days it took to travel to Dublin, then Cork and finally to Baltimore, where I caught my ferry to Cape Clear Island. To be even more honest, even now I'm not certain the blue has fully receded from my post-Peace Corps existence. But we're getting there.

I arrived in Ireland with only a vague idea of where I was going, and it was a testament to how far I'd come in the past year that I was unperturbed by the lack of details. I made it to the island, where I hoped someone would pick me up on the pier. And I could grasp only to the belief that things would fall into place.

Which of course they did. I spent the following six weeks on the Cape, doing odd jobs around the grounds of the pubs and guest accommodations where I lived with a Kiwi and the friend-of-a-friend I'd met briefly in Germany. We took instructions from a chain-smoking South African woman. In the evenings we'd tromp through the bouncy, emerald grass to the cliffs where we'd watch birds sail and dive as the sun went down. We climbed into the ruins of an old castle one afternoon, and we saw the standing stones, the cemetery, the inland lake. We spent St. Patrick's Day in Cork. Every Thursday I took an evening pottery class in North Harbor. Nights were in the pubs, either pulling pints or drinking them, where over time I finally adjusted to the melody and variance of the Irish accent. But every foggy morning, my ability to understand faded again. At one point, I turned 23. And we listened to the stories, and we listened to the songs, and it was just about as poetic as it sounds. And yes, there were loads of spuds.

But before I knew it I was bidding goodbye to this new home too, and to a tall, ginger Irishman. I spent two nights in a hostel in Dublin before that crazy flight back to the States. I was bound for Birmingham to spend some time in my brother's new home. Unfortunately, it was the hardest travel day of my life, but that's a story worthy of a lively telling the next time we meet. After about 26 hours, I was seated in the humid Southern air again, waiting desperately for the sight of my tall, bearded brother, the first of my loved ones to be within hugging distance for roughly ten months.

But not just any ten months.

After Birmingham, I travelled to St. Louis to meet my dad, who was working there. And I had a whole new chance to try, try, try to tell my stories again. After a couple of days, we drove back home, where we found my mom digging in her flower gardens. And I tried again. The next week I went back to Muncie to see my old friends, another new audience for all these crazy things I have to say. But mostly we all laughed and hugged and celebrated, and I discovered that the few people who had kept in touch with me during my time away really were the best of the people that I knew.

But it took only about three weeks for stagnation to drive me crazy, and so last Tuesday I climbed onto another plane, headed even further West.

I'm living in Yosemite National Park for the summer, where a couple of people I love and trust have said I might find peace. And if that isn't the goal of all this wandering, I'm not sure what is.