I think the world it will anoint me, if I show it how I hold it

Sometimes I think the line between romance and bastardized, crass reality is pretty blurry.

Like taking something you thought was beautiful three years ago out of the box and realizing that it just seems cheap, sentimental, simplistic, ugly; you thought it was transcendent but it's actually just pap. Things that used to cohere seem a little too disparate to share the same space comfortably. Why do things go from glorious to trashy to disgusting to glorious again and how can they drift around in the spaces between those words, never completely affixed? I think sometimes my problem is that I don't pin anything down. Everything is beautiful and then ugly again if you've stared at it long enough.

I am sleepy but all I can seem to do when I try to fall asleep is lie there for hours, thinking. I am confused, because there is no real reason for me to be an insomniac now. I'm not terribly stressed and I stopped drinking caffeine late in the day. Maybe I am keyed up and I just haven't realized it yet. April frightens me this year.

A year ago, exactly, I was on a plane back from the Philippines. A bookend. I feel like I divide my life into plane flights now, which isn't so bad, and which is also why I enjoy flying alone. It scares me to think of myself as a continuum, rather than a loose conglomeration of fragmented selves. I associate with past iterations of myself the way one looks at old photos in an album. When I came back last year it was severe culture shock, like some kind of benevolent post-traumatic stress disorder, complete with flashbacks. I tried so hard to acclimate myself to life somewhere else that when I came back it was difficult to adjust. Everything reminded me of the kids and the people I worked with, and whenever my brain was unoccupied memories came flooding back in to fill the space. My mind was always somewhere else, touching down in reality only occasionally, when necessary. I miss that. I learned so much while I was gone and I feel like I'm just losing it slowly, because so much of it was intangible and indescribable. I don't want it to fade into distant memory, to become something insignificant, but that's what it will be eventually.

The few times I was really upset in Manila (and there were a few... sometimes it was hard), I remember lying in bed, crying, drawing a mental line back home, crossing the ocean and the vast distance. I always got that strange feeling where you know that you're far away but you don't feel like you are; it seems like your surroundings might just be an extension of your hometown, altered slightly. It happened in Thailand, too. In both cases, I was literally halfway around the world. I miss the swelling feeling of empowerment and beautiful isolation that comes with the realization that you are very, very far away from home and totally on your own, which was one I got every so often at my barangay.

I've just been thinking about it a lot lately, as it dawns on me that I've been back for a full year. My life felt kind of... stagnant for such a long time. I was so sick of waiting. And then the past year and a half was nuts. Maybe too many new hats for such a short expanse of time.