indiana

Just spent two days working in Indiana. I feel so blessed to have had an awesome trip and return home and literally hit the ground running. Having somewhere else to focus all my energy has helped me readjust in a lot of ways, although I feel like I’m experiencing home/Nashville through a visitor’s eyes, and I’m only passing through.

Today when I woke up, I felt so lonely, lonely to the point that theres something pounding somewhere deep within me. I’ve often felt this way when waking up to go to work, and before my trip I was terrified that I would feel ten times as lonely waking up on the other side of the world with no familiar faces within 9,000 miles. This morning when I felt that old, familiar twang, I realized I hadn’t felt it in a significant length of time — I didn’t experience it at all on my trip. Which is interesting: Why the pangs of loneliness when I’m home (home being the US) and waking up before doing a job I love?

I don’t know.

I went by Target a few days ago near here — the Target that I last went to the day before my trip — and it’s totally gutted. A lot of the stores nearby were completely empty, and there were only five or six cars in the entire parking lot. It’s unreal. It’s weird to have not been here when the flooding happened, but to come back and find a lot of things gone. As I said in my adventure/travel blog, it’s like being in an alternate reality.

The weirdest thing about coming back has been how long the sun stays out. In New Zealand, the sun would set by 5:30pm/6:00. Here, it’s light out at 8pm and for the first few days I wouldn’t realize the time and end up eating dinner at like 10:00. And in Indiana, they’re further west than Nashville but in the Eastern time zone, and with simple addition you can figure out it was 9:30 before it was completely dark.

And anyway. I’m losing my ability to write coherent and complex sentences. Goodnight.