One Year in a Vacuum
Sunday, February 10th, 2008It’s been over a month since we returned home, and a few days since our post-RTW trip-vacation to Costa Rica. I vacillate between wanting to leave again, craving a home and a job, and generally feeling like a deflated tire or a trampoline that isn’t bouncy anymore.
The good thing about being home has been the countless reunions with family, old friends and former coworkers.
The top three questions tend to be:
1. What was your favorite place?
2. Are you glad to be back?
3. Does it feel weird to be home?
We’ve developed canned answers for these questions, JR pulls the Teddy Ruxpin string hanging from my back and I deliver the same boring canned answer. Sometimes I’d like to just pull a black ski mask over my face and stand mute. But then everyone would think I was crazy and unstable (oh heavens!)…hence the canned boring answers.
Or, people will pose an open-ender “Tell me all about your trip!”, and proceed to get creeped out by my blank stare/cross-eyed response. Should I tell them about when I cried in a cow field with a bloody knee and declared that I “hated” Thailand (I actually love Thailand, but that moment I felt differently)? Or maybe about the train ride in India when I accidentally boarded the crowded man-only car; I was visually assaulted for ten solid minutes. I felt naked even with pants and a billowy long-sleeved top and imagined the men must be whispering “she ain’t from ’round here” in Urdu or Hindi or Malayalam. Temptation is strong to tell the high shock-value tales, but depending on the audience, I muster up a three sentence story ending with “it was really neat”.
Now its time to figure out what to do next. I’m attempting to make a career of writing and JR is racking his brain for a small business idea, ideally one that will allow him to work from anywhere. It sometimes feels like the past year existed in a parallel universe and we never left, but the evidence is undeniable: we’re not quite the same.
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