Saturday 24 May 2014

Again. But different.

Tomorrow at 4am I leave for the airport. Once there I will check in, probably browse Boots and other stores buying too much ibuprofen and maybe some preventative thrush tablets. I'll eat food I don't want and probably a coffee I won't drink before I board the plane to Sri Lanka via Doha.

It's been nearly a year since I last departed for Sri Lanka and 6 months since I've been back. I feel like many things have changed, yet most things haven't which is what I'm anticipating feeling in Sri Lanka and that is comforting. The places will hopefully feel more familiar, the food will be more delicious and the toilets won't be such a surprise. But there will be all new people. All new people to get to know, to look after and to worry about. All new fears for them and dreams they're achieving and times they just really want to fucking go home. All new hospital visits and infections, broken toes and lice. All new families and places to sleep and things to try to understand.

These are the reasons I love my job. No day is ever the same. I can never be bored and the times when I want to just kick something are the times when I achieve clarity and when I remember why I'm doing what I'm doing. Why they are doing what they are doing. I work with the best. I learn from the most skilled and compassionate people I've ever known. At times I feel like a total fraud. Like a psychopath who is learning how to pretend at emotion and trying to convince people that I'm really legit. Like I can be trusted. But the truth is I feel absolutely everything. I feel it in a way that my face can't convey and my mouth can't articulate, but I feel everything that happens and everything that I fear will happen and everything that doesn't happen. I worry all day and my sleep is fragmented with more worry and then I start another day of the same. Almost the same.

I wonder about Steve. How he'll be this time around and if he'll ever betray the veneer of perfectly fine, perfectly calm. I know his heart breaks a little and he probably has no idea that my rhythm is out of sync as well. The murmur which becomes much more of a groan is his. It's always more difficult for the one who stays behind. Who does all the stuff you do together, but alone. Who has no distractions except for the distraction of the empty bed, the lack of washing up. No more clothes I left in the basket for the wash that were actually already clean. Nothing to get annoyed about or to change the emotion he feels for me. Just the constant space until I can fill it again.

These months away from the UK will be jam-packed with crazy and laughter and fatigue. Each day will bleed into the next and before I understand that a month has just passed, it has. The melancholy doesn't last and the highs are really fucking high. I just hope that there's still space for me and that this time around will be some of what it was last time. Ideally I'd like a few less vagina punches, but I know that's asking a lot. I want smiles and challenges and plenty of sweaty hugs. I want tuk tuk drivers with neon smiles and sarees that require sunglasses to admire. I want plenty of EGB or I won't get any food and I want to shop at No Limit and buy something I might actually want to wear at home. But mostly I want it all to be OK and for everyone to have a beautiful, transformation time just like lat time. I want it all again. But different.


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