Mosquitos. Horns. Loud and busy and why the heck is it raining. Shop fronts and no sidewalks. Loud. Where did that moto come from and driving slowly with a helmet this time. Power cuts and internet spottiness.
I am so tired. Sleeping on the airplane -- my lucky string of discovering the rows with only one other person continues -- did no good. A 3-hour nap I barely dragged myself up from, in bed at eight and awake after nine and still couldn't get up. Another 1.5 hour nap today, and if things don't change, another in the works.
Twelve hours on the airplane and back to the humidity and in a tuk tuk. Side saddle on a motorbike and a plastic bag of trinkets distributed to the dancers. Everything as it was, as though untouched, as though it all froze for a month and only by touching it it came back to life, animated like a wind-up toy.
Everything as it was but it's not, precisely as I remembered but the reality is shocking. I am the only one who has changed, one month away and rediscovering worlds I once knew that became home, became beloved once more, and then left them to their own devices to re-enter this one and I admit as we dipped and descended towards Malaysia, the awful propaganda video playing in front of me, I thought, what the hell am I doing here.
When we descended into Phnom Penh, I was asleep. There was no one in the row with me, no window at the end for whatever reason, just fuselage, and so I closed my eyes instead and only knew we'd arrived by the bump of the wheels hitting the ground. Then I opened my eyes and blinked once into the madness, clambering into a tuk tuk and staring around me.
I knew it. Knew it all, expected what I saw, not the wide-eyed astonishment of the first time, but this time reentering a place that had become familiar, comfortable, easy, and now was strange and chaotic (it was the chaos I missed those first few days in the manicured, carefully crafted first-world streets.)
I know what I'm doing here. I love the opportunities, I'm excited about what I can do here, I have ideas and projects. I have friends. I love the opportunities and so I learned to like the life. I have purpose and a path.
My head knows this, and somewhere I think my heart does too.
But for right now, changing lives three times in one month has left me confused and dazed, stumbling back into a life I used to know so well with blank and unseeing eyes. I'm sure within a few weeks, it will be all I remember and this cloud of culture shock will have lifted. It always does, eventually. But the old saying is true: once you begin traveling, you cannot go home again.
Or maybe, you can, except "home" is different, home is where you are at the moment, and reentering old moments is jarring and uncertain. But the thing about that too, is like the great poet T.S. Eliot wrote:
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started,
and know it for the first time.
I have returned to where I started, and indeed knew it for the first time, and each time I return I will know it again, and again, rediscovering more of each world I never thought to look for. For that, I am blessed, and acknowledge it freely.
But right now, all I want to do is bury my head in the pillows against the chaos and sleep until I wake and find the eyes I had before, and that this place that I used to know is once again comfortable.
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