vacation blues

Ok, so it's weird. I've been back from my trip (to Lebanon, Damascus, and Istanbul) for a little over a week now and for most of that week I've been stricken by an ailment I've dubbed "the vacation blues." I'm probably not the first to come up with this term. I'm sure you can sympathize. You leave your daily routine of life and head somewhere completely different from where you are for a little while (2.5 weeks, in this case). You fly away; you turn your phone off. And time feels like it's moving so slow when you get there and begin spending time at that faraway place; you get sucked the new world that exists at the coordinates of your escape. Everything is new and therefore you tend to savor the passing moments, so that they don't so much feel like they are passing but that they will last forever. Sure, you talk about your old life in your vacation place, think about it even, but it is not really real, not something you feel and breathe. Occasionally you count the days until you have to go back, and each time you are happy because you still have time. But eventually, the last day comes, the last walk to the beach, the last sit on the balcony, the last dinner, the last night you dream here, the last morning you wake up. The last car ride on vacation is to the airport and you look out the window and the vacation still exists.

And then you fly home.

BAM!

Back to your life. Everyone and everything is happy to see you. You look at photos, tell stories about airports and night clubs and ferries and cobbled alleys. You tell them about the sarcophagi of 3000 year old mummies, and the corpses themselves, blackened skin that didn't look like skin, clinging in pieces to brown bones. But you also want to know, and they also want to tell you, how they're doing, how home has been without you. And it's almost like you weren't even gone.

Not to be a downer. I realized today--standing on my cousin's roof, a delicious meal beginning to digest inside me and the weekend ahead of me, the sun disappearing slowly below the rainbow sky, the buildings down the hills around us like colored tiles--that it's nice to be back.