Walking sideways on the edge of the world

(by the time I return, I think, I'll have begun to flip right side up,
enough to find my own people equally upside down, 
and will have to find the way to walk sideways, 
on the edge of the earth). 

I wrote that awhile ago, near the beginning of my stay here.

On Thanksgiving night, I had a wonderful meal with good people, with all the staples and the good stuff, good conversation. I very much enjoyed myself.

But the food was too much. I'm not used to eating that kind of food anymore, and I felt kind of bloated. I wanted rice the next day, or fruit.

The next morning, I was on skype with my family, looking at the apartment and wanting to join them, but --

Sometimes I do feel kind of like a stranger in both worlds. I can already tell how strange it will be to be back in the US, even for a visit, and how the poem is making itself true. I'm flipping, and I don't think here will ever be fully right side up, just sideways enough to make things back home look pretty sideways too.

I guess it just comes with the territory of living in a culture that is so different. Staying where you come from is a lot less complicated than navigating the unsettling culture shock, tiptoeing around home that is not home. Looking at where you want to be and knowing that because of where you have been, what you remember it as will not be the same when you step back in, both you and the place itself changed.

This week was a violent mix of brilliance and stress, beauty and exhaustion, feeling under-appreciated and feeling heartily blessed, and the two have mixed badly, like oil and vinegar being forced to co-habit. Although I still have much to do and many things to accomplish and deal with and sort out and wait for the world to turn in the next week, I'm trying to take some time off this weekend.

Waiting until everything stops spinning around me -- or at least, to just let it spin and not spin with it for a time, until I can jump back in.