1. Nostalgia.

    Today’s one of those weird days when anything and everything makes me nostalgic.

    Waking up early to the sunlight through my window and snuggling up with a good book made me think of how when I was young I did this every day in the summer and on weekends.

    The smell of sharpies as I worked on lesson plans today brought me back to doing school projects with my dad.

    My workout video this morning had a lot of the same exercises I used to do for swimming pre-season.

    Eating mushrooms for lunch gave me a flashback of how I used to despise mushrooms, even preparing them.

    Songs I have only heard in Moldova are today bringing me back to times before Moldova.

    Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m nearing six months in this country.  It is the longest I have gone without seeing my family, without seeing most of the people I am close to, and without stepping foot on American soil.  I’m not so much homesick as feeling this kind of longing or pull towards America… towards bagels and burritos, towards my Civic and my stuffed elephant Tutakhamon, towards Christmas season commercialism and overplayed music, towards gyms and pools, libraries and coffeeshops…  And not to mention the knowledge that this will be my first Christmas away from home.

    I am constantly having these moments when I look around me and it hits me, as if for the first time, that I’m in Moldova, or when I look at a calendar and say, ‘It has finally truly hit me I’ll be here for twenty-seven months.’  But I think it really is hitting me now.  That I’m six months in and yet not even quite one-fourth done. 

    I made a pledge to myself to not return to America to visit until at least next fall.  I told myself, ‘It’s people I miss the most, not things.  I can do without guacamole and Tropicana a little while longer.’  And if it’s people I miss, well, there’s no way I could just go and see them all in one place at one time.  Everyone I know and love right now is spread literally all over the world. 

    But still.  A drive to Danbury with my brother to get a Desert Moon tofu burrito sounds pretty delightful right now.  And then a duck into Staples to remind myself of the joy of pre-Christmas commercialism when two or not even seven brands of post-it notes are sufficient. 





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