Learning to Let Go

In less than a week, I will leave the noisy, humid, exhilarating city of Buenos Aires and return to Texas. I will have been gone for exactly 13 months. As I was preparing to leave for Chile, I wrote this “. As the departure date February 22nd 2011 transforms from a distant daydream into an imminent reality, now that my plans and a dream of mine come to fruition, I feel a smorgasbord of contrastive emotions to include the following but not exclude unlisted emotions: excitement, anxiety, mania, fear, gratefulness, elation, disbelief, unworthiness, joy, phantasmagorical and nervousness. The internal sloshing has concocted some bewildering cocktails.” (I just had to look up phantasmagorical haha, neat word though doesn't really make sense. Actually, I would rephrase the sentence entirely but that's neither here nor there.)

Now 13 months later, I’m going through a similar process again. Only this time, the place I am returning to is much more familiar. I know exactly what my house will smell like and that the air-conditioning will be humming day and night at 70 degrees. I know the feeling of cold tile that I will be walking on. In spite of all this, my life in the US has become like a distant dream. When I think about how life changing has been, I can only hope that it will not all fade to black.