t-minus one month til re-entry

two nights ago i went out to dinner to celebrate my 5 month anniversary of being on the road. the ethnic food of the moment in budapest is apparently indian, so i obliged. two hours later, in the fetal position in my bed, i reveled in india. it tastes good going down, oh so good. but just wait.

now i am sitting on the floor of a packed coffee house. yesterday i found out i got into depaul. the thought of it still makes me feel a bit giddy inside. sometimes in the past 5 months i've woken up in the morning with an unnerving feeling of panic. one worry broke the dam and opened the floodgate to let each insecurity and inevitability in. but now the knowledge that i will be a student, a role i actually know how to inhabit, gives me some footing in the present. funny how the future can do that.

now i return to the also-comfortable habit of procrastinating the single thing on my to do list. today, in a sea of people getting on the metro, i heard a girl speaking english. i froze and almost ran into someone. i wanted to eavesdrop, listen, overhear. it was so foreign, this intimate connection forged with a stranger. the free entertainment of eavesdropping. what's going to happen to me when i get home? when i would rather shut it out for the romantic cacophony of exoticism? when i'll long to return to the world of courtney amidst thousands or millions of others. where i am a child, dependent on kind strangers, void of responsibility, floating.

perhaps the most interesting aspect of returning home after spending the majority of the past 3 years away will be finding the fittingness. that's always the question, i guess. you know when you bought a fish for a tank? you never put it directly into the tank. you left it in the little plastic sack, submerged it in the tank and then opened the sack and let it out after like 20 minutes. that's how the fish finds the fit. but how the hell do we do it? in a way i thought traveling for 6 months would do it. to an extent, it has. however, it's also created a world where i am even more firmly an outsider to everything. i've thought about loneliness, and i think what it really is is when no one can fully understand your experiences. in a way, that's fine. as long as i don't expect anyone to. maybe that's the biggest thing i've gained. comfort with solitude.

time in my sack, looking at the other side, has made me wonder what i will be like when i emerge. will i keep the new habits or will i return to u.s. laziness where i would go days without walking further than to the car (that's mainly in the winter, but still)? somehow, it's all more exciting than frightening. it's like a conscious fresh start. but, for now, i am going to revel in my last moments in the plastic. looking in.