Two thirds of the way back to Los Angeles living, belly full of anti-diarrheals and a soy chai tea late (because you didn’t think that a major case of Delhi belly could keep me away from Starbucks after 9 and a half months, did you?), and heart brimming with… who knows what. Pick an emotion, chances are it’s swirling around somewhere in the upper left cavity of my chest.
I thought that being ready to leave would make it easier to go. But nothing eases the ache of bidding farewell to love. We’re not built to love and then leave, even if we know that we are not meant to stay.
And so the girls’ smiles are etched under my skin. And walking away from them (perhaps forever) leaves ever-hidden scars.
I spent my last Indian night in the New Delhi airport, skimming the lettering of my diary’s last 9 months of musings. It was time to depart, and yet when I left I could hear in the distance the chorus of my heart’s breaking strings.
April 15th, 2010
Three weeks and one day. Three weeks. Three weeks? How did this happen? Where did the time go?
Well, to summer and winter and spring and then to summer again. I suppose that that is where it went. To August and then December and then April’s mid mark. It went to friendships and Manali and Girls’ Club and heating water on an open fire outside; it traveled with Kelly to the dunes of the Thar Desert, returned back to Sotla’s brittle cold; it went, hours and months at a time, from Himalayan hills to the Gange’s flowing spirit; it found D’s frantic head nod, and suddenly time has departed.
I have been challenged and rewarded and torn and encouraged.
And I wonder how 8 months has changed me. I wonder if I am different than that terrified girl in the Dehli airport, brushing teeth in the upstairs bathroom of the domestic terminal, in disbelief at what madness awaited her.
I now know what madness.
And what joy.
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