Transition

I have now been repatriated for one week. My sleeping habits have been thrown off by the drastic reduction of natural light. My eating habits are all higgledy-piggledy because suddenly there's all this food around all the time that I can just eat without hardly any preparation. Now that I'm not walking or dancing so much, I need to find new ways to exercise. The main theme of my life right now, therefore, is reestablishing biorhythms.

I have not unintentionally restricted my interpersonal contact almost entirely to my immediate family, because that's about all I've been able to deal with. My mom has told me I seem to be adjusting well on an emotional level, and on the whole I think she is correct. Nonetheless, I feel like part of my heart got ripped out and left behind. In part, of course, this is because I said good-bye to the first person I ever fell in love with in the airport, and I don't know when I'll see him again. But it is also because I fell in love with a whole bunch of people, a natural environment, and a way of living that I can't carry back with me, no matter how many pictures I upload to Facebook, songs I cram onto flash drives, and entries I post on my blog. I stay fairly even-keel, but there are moments, before I fall asleep at night or while I'm washing the dishes, that I feel completely overwhelmed by a sense of loss and I start to cry. And then, mere minutes later, the feeling passes. It's like the isolated rainclouds that would come in off the ocean, showering Puerto in a fierce downpour. The only thing to do was stop under an overhang and wait patiently, taking the time to admire the rain and the moment, because both would soon pass.