The Big Goodbye

There have been so many goodbyes already!

First there was my last official day as the boys' au pair, crying into their hair before leaving for a monastic week of silence and song at Taizè...

...but we said hello again a week later, when I dropped my immense backpack on the floor, and they came running to offer up Legos, drawings, and dinner.

And then there I went to Morocco, and came back. They had their first overnight summer camp experience, their first nature arts'n'crafts cabin experience, while I tasted sweet mint tea (which fellow traveler Ollie deemed "a hug for my throat"), looked at camels and avoided snakes. Talked philosophy and love with Lindsay on three different beaches, and sprawled beneath the air conditioner. Slept in. Listened to strange music, shrank away from the market barter and haggle, and wondered once a day what was happening back home in Turin.

We had danced all weekend in a marriage celebration, and I watched the wedding with all the family secrets subtitling the traditional ceremonies. I caught the bouquet. I danced with my host parents, and clinked mojitos. I worked for them? Awesome.

And there was the penultimate goodbye this morning, our last time at home together. They drove away to the seaside while I wept and waved from the stoop, departing tomorrow. When I took the elevator upstairs alone I thought about how opposite this was from the airport goodbye I had pictured. (But I'm the one leaving!, I said to me.)

Now I look around my room at all the little things that don't really belong anywhere. I have weighed and reweighed my bags, and despite my inability to lift them they are miraculously below the weight limit for both Aer Lingus and United Airlines. Tomorrow at dawn I will leave this home and never live in it again, to go back to another home that I have never seen before. What if it was here?, I ask myself when the goodbye gets teary. What about that College Home, and the Childhood Home, and that future Married Home? I guess we're always coming from one and going to another. It's useless to keep track anymore as I feel like I now belong so much to myself and so little to places.

Look at my pictures on Facebook! If you haven't a profile, you can email me and I'll send you a way in.

I will be back in the Bay Area on August 3rd or 4th, somewhat impoverished and somewhat more luminous. Unreachable and without a valid California ID. You will recognise me from the new short haircut, the North African tan, and the suitcasing wrinkles in all my clothes. And the politely distracted I-think-my-life-just-changed-again gaze.