Miscellaneous

Sorry to leave you with that elephant camp cliffhanger.....I'll pick up where I left off soon, I promise :)

I realize that I said it in my last blog entry, but I'll say it again with a little more gusto: March has by far been the best month that I've had in the last two years. Hell, it's been one of the best months of my life thus far!! And I KNEW that a month like this was always just around the corner. I endured loneliness and illness and injury and grief and locusts and plagues and holy crap IT WAS WORTH IT. Part of me feels bummed that I am now in a full-on sprint to the finish line--I'm at the three-and-a-half month mark now--but timing is a funny thing. Now that I'm finally meeting people (two of whom live in my building and I met them while power walking on two separate occasions!! Yay for power walking!!) and feeling happy and secure and after I truly found my stride at work it's time to pack up my boxes and head on home. However, it's also as a result of timing that everything has fallen into place. On the one hand, the things that I love will not be in my grasp for much longer, so it's time to absorb everything with complete and utter abandon. On the other hand, the things that are difficult are incredibly impermanent and will not have to be endured for much longer. The thing that I have come to realize, though, is that while my time out here is fleeting and impermanent, so is LIFE!!! Sometimes I get tunnel vision and define my life in small perspectives, in narrow horizons. I let small events and interactions and situations fill the entire atmosphere of my being until everything is clouded over and obscured and confusing and dramatic. I had to come to Asia to unlearn this. And I have.

On a less serious note, I am recovering from an eye infection because a piece of urban filth collided with my cornea while I was walking down the street the other day. I also have a random rash covering my neck and creeping up onto my face, and I have no idea what is causing it. Ah, Bangkok. What will I do without the random health woes that you impart upon me daily?

With this newfound peace and contentment that I am feeling right now I am finding that certain things I have been keeping at bay for a long time are starting to rise to the surface. I had sort of put my grief into mental file cabinets for a more convenient time when my entire emotional system was not solely focused on survival. And now these small balloons inside of me are filling, filling, filling.

The six month anniversary of Max's death came and went a few days ago, and I find myself surprised by how raw and stinging the pain of it still is. Max and I were not regularly in touch for about a year before his death (though we had recently gotten back in touch thanks to Facebook, and he posted a message on my wall the day he died), and yet I find myself thinking about him every day. We can never fully understand the ways in which we impact other people, for better or worse. And we can never anticipate how much we might miss people after they're gone.

This is going in a very rambly and inarticulate direction, so I'm going to borrow someone else's words for now. A reader of this blog sent me this Robert Frost poem awhile back, and I find myself reciting it (and getting chills because of its quiet power) whenever I think about Max. And so I will share it here as I remember a beloved friend, and allow it to serve as a reminder of the precious and fleeting impermanence of this life.

I wish you all the love and happiness your heart desires on this perfect, perfect day.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.