Lamentations

Five years. Four addresses. Five jobs. One funeral.

Welcome back, my friends, to the online therapy session that never ends.

How do I summarize a half a decade of my life in a few paragraphs? At this point, five years is a drop in the bucket. It's roughly a seventh of my life. A few things the other sevenths of my life held: birth, puberty, poverty, devirginization, graduation, and Hollywood (to name a select few). Oh yeah, and there as that whole Peace Corps thing.

Next week it will have been five years since my plane touched down in California, the last step of a premature end to my days as a volunteer in Kazakhstan. Chronic intermittent stomach pain was my undoing. While I was there, I fell in love... twice, was physically in the best shape of my life (stomach issues aside, of course), and (according to sources) was the target of short, whiny, Russian terrorists hellbent on murdering me for my oilwells. Oh, and one time, I crapped my pants (not a lot, but a little goes a long way)... a rite of passage in the Peace Corps.

You know the expression, "it doesn't seem like it has been five years?" Well in my case it does seem like it has been five years. I experienced some of the most memorable moments of my life in Central Asia, but five years out I'm having trouble remembering a lot of it. I remember faces without names and incidents without specific dates. It is becoming a jumble... much like the rest of my life.

If, as they say, the moments are all we have, then what does it say when the moments blur and fade? I lived a half a world away for an entire year, a change one could only describe as dramatic, but five years later it has merged with all the rest of the junk cluttering my mind. I don't want it to do that. I spoke another language for goodness sake, and even that has been reduced to a few words and phrases.

The human mind is a complex set of somethings that when something happens, it cause something else to happen, and all of those somethings join together to make... something. Perhaps if I'd paid more attention in science class, I would know how my mind works. And perhaps if I knew how my mind worked I'd be better able to keep my memories intact, and possibly delete the bad ones. Perhaps not.

Five years ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Roslyn, VA waiting for the Peace Corps powers-that-be to decide my fate. And while I understood their decision at the time, I felt then (and now) that they chose poorly. The mildly compulsive part of my nature hates leaving things unfinished. To this day I regret not having been able to spend one more year in Central Asia.

As I noted at the time, there is a freedom that can only come from living in a foreign land surrounded by strangers. I'm not talking about visiting as a tourist... I'm talking about packing up and living a life elsewhere. The locals already expect you to be different from them, so there's no point in trying to be what might be conventionally defined as "normal." You say and do whatever you want (within limited reason, of course), and though many assume I do that wherever I hang my hat... they have no idea.

My current job does not allow me to be myself. I can be a heavily filtered version of myself, but it isn't the same. My preference in life has always been to be who I am with as little pretense as possible, and I am keenly aware that preference has cost me relationships and financial gain over the years. At day's end, I'd rather be myself alone than somebody else with somebody else, and I'd rather be myself poor than somebody else rich. Which was why, being myself alone and poor, the Peace Corps was perfect for me. It allowed me to genuinely fall in love and experience life in its purest, rawest form. Five years later, I still miss it.