So here's how we're gonna do this--the question no one actually cares to ask but can't seem to stop themselves from asking: "How's the adjustment back from your mission going?"
First matter of business, I feel super weird about the fact that I have a blog. I keep waiting thinking maybe it'll go away or maybe I'll remember why I started it in the first place. Ha. No such luck. So instead I'll just keep it going for the moment, for my friends or anybody who cares.
Second item: on Thursday last, in the middle of the cleaning-supplies aisle in the grocery store, I burst into tears. Like, BURST into tears. I was somewhere between the OxiClean and shoe polish. The butter is so expensive in America, and all the produce is organized maniacally like a factory, and the entire width of the yogurt "aisle" is shorter than my arm, and apparently sometime in the last year and a half they stopped making the only kind of laundry detergent that I liked. Also, everyone around me is speaking English.
I mean, I tried to pull myself together. No one except crazy people burst into tears in the middle of the OxiClean and shoe polish. I am not crazy. I just can't find the food I like because it's all in France!
So to summarize: I am currently incapable of grocery shopping.
Then we've got the daily "I just said what?" moments: Today a guy showed up at my door. More like I showed up at my door and he was outside plugging his phone into our porch wall (??), so I let him in, and he commented on how I was wearing two different colors of socks. I retorted, "They're gray and black. Gray and black aren't colors." Yep I actually said that. No social tact.
This is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that I suddenly have a streak of benevolence-bordering-on-affection for bugs, white eggshells creep me out, I want to use exclamation marks all the time!, and I still reach for the flush button on the top-center of the toilet.
What is to be said about this. Well, it took me two months to write. Talk about a blockage. I'm not entirely sure how one goes about breaking an 18-month writing hiatus, but likewise I'm not entirely sure how one goes about saying something about those 18 months that could wrap a pretty little bow on it all and let it be tucked away somewhere nice on a shelf to sit for the rest of forever. I think I'm hesitant to let go. Once you think through everything and set those thinks down on paper, the book is written. So I imagine this will be the work of the next few years--working out what my mission meant then and what it means now and what words are the hooks that untangle it all.
So thanks for being patient with me.
Love,
