Thoughts

It's been, more or less, a month since I've left Amman.

You can tell yourself for four months that life the way you are living it is temporary, but that isn't any sort of life, so I tried to block that part out and embrace living in Amman as my existence. Maybe it worked too well.

It was kind of a haze of confusion and overstimulation, the first week- and that, combined with the all too "festive" cheer of consumerist America, I felt pretty lost. When Katie and I talked it over, we agreed that it felt like someone had died and we were grieving. Which sounds kind of horrible to say, and being someone who has lost those very close to me, feels horrible to say about such a situation, but the feelings and emotions translated over. It was grieving for the loss of something that is now unattainable, something that we will never ever get back.

On the drive home from the airport I sat in sort of a stunned haze. The buildings were short. The highways were lined. The cars had seat belts, and I was sitting in the front of one, and there was no Arabic on any of the signs.

I cried when I got home. I put on a smile and said hi to my parents and then I went into my room and I cried. I put on March of the Penguins to lull myself to sleep, and when I woke up I turned on my camera and listened to the recording of the call to prayer I had made the week before I left.

I was thankful, in that moment, for having the foresight to record it. Listening to it was like a balm on my soul, soothing it from the fraying it was experiencing from being torn between two sides of the world.

It's a month in, and I've "assimilated". I still put in my keys upside down half the time, and when a friend told me one of my bowls had broken while I was gone I had to resist the urge to shout out "20 JD!". When I'm home alone, talking to my dog (as all crazy dog people do) I still spout off some inshallahs and mish mushkilas, but they've vanished from my every day vocabulary by way of very active suppression.

People ask about Jordan, about my trip, but they aren't actively interested in the experience- they are interested in exoticizing it. "Did you see Petra??" is inevitably one of the questions that always pops up. It's easier to pretend that nothing changed, that I haven't changed and the way I perceive the world hasn't changed, because it would be exhausting to interact with people.

Sometimes my heart aches when I think about how I'm back to studying the Middle East from the cold ivory tower of academia.

I don't really have any answers for any of this, right now. I'm not even sure I have the right questions.