You want to know how I’m doing, right? Well, I’m exactly three weeks back yesterday and I’ll disband the suspense: I’m doing fine. The people who love me have been asking this question, how are you doing?, or: how is the transition?, and I really appreciate it because the return has been interesting.

Thankfully, this isn’t my first return to the US since service started. I came back a whole handful of times… So I am revisiting all of the feelings I had all of the other times coming back, but this time I am readapting to this lifestyle instead of peering in at it and running away. Now I am here indefinitely. Plunk. That’s me sinking like a coin in a fountain. Make a wish.

But this isn’t a ‘normal’ end of service because I am processing a lot more than just leaving Guatemala. I stopped drinking alcohol altogether, and broke-up with someone, right before service ended. These changes have left me picking up the pieces on top of what has already been a massive transition and rendered me fragile.

Emotional fragility is such a puzzling state. It connects you with other people’s unspoken struggles, or what you imagine they are hurting while only emitting small clues… This state of mind causes me to think back on situations people were going through in the past and how I didn’t understand why they were tripping, or the depth of the pain they were enduring. And I feel bad I didn’t cut them more slack back then.

A quote from Shadowlands has come to the surface of my consciousness (the part in bold): God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. “[Pain is a] megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” I repeat this phrase in my head when I go about living and doing frivolous things without realizing it’s floated to my consciousness. Consider myself roused, God. Love, Me and CS Lewis.

But I learned sometime between college and adulting that life usually balances out: between the difficult moments and the near euforia of winning catchphrase at game night; we’re all cooking up meals in life with the ingredients we got, the flavors come out different because circumstance provided different spice racks but at the end of the day, we’re all trying to get full.

At four days in to my return I wrote these words:

I’ve been home four days and it’s weird. I filled up my tank of gas for the first time today. 
Yesterday I went into Costco for the first time, drove my car for the first time (I didn’t drive until three days in, purposefully). I got a phone number. I ate a Peanut Butter Fudge Milkshake. 
On Sunday I used my credit card for the first time. 
Today I went bowling.

A few people have asked: “And what’s the biggest shock?” The biggest shock? Other than how putting toilet paper in the toilet feels wrong, precarious, irresponsible, it’s the fact that I am here… indefinitely. 

I’ve been here only 4 days and it feels like a lifetime. Things about this country don’t stick to me because I am trying to be less sticky. I am trying to keep up the magnetism of Peace Corps so that I repel the things I don’t want to be a part of my existence. Tonight I looked at the smoothly paved roads of the highway as wide as the ocean and the color of tar the hue of your darkest sin. I hope that blackness and bright orange paint lines never become normal again. They were like gliding across butter. There were literally no bumps at all, not even the transmission shifting gears.

I haven’t been feeling culture shock so much as culture pause. 

I’m not shocked by culture because I knew all of this was coming. I came home FIVE TIMES during service (too many) so I knew what was going to shock me: gratuitous bright lights, city traffic, unfriendly strangers, English, wealth, never paying with cash, the food, the hurry, all of it.

But now I feel a deeper responsibility to my country because it is my home again. Now I am not a visitor. Now I am contributing to the culture of the USA. Achk.

Meanwhile, I relish the things that still don’t “work like they’re supposed to” in the country of superior status: my sister’s eternally slow water dispenser in her fridge (it could take five minutes to fill-up my bottle, maybe I’m exaggerating, check with me in five minutes..) the Dunkin’ Donuts that gets every order wrong and I love them anyway.

I cling to these things like lifelines. The (few) things that don’t work like they’re supposed to.

Meanwhile I notice the people who do linger, who aren’t in a rush to get to the next thing, who do stay and chat, sit and make eye contact. I’ve villainized my culture for being unsociable, but maybe it was me all along accepting the coldness and adopting it myself. What if I had stopped to linger, listened and stayed longer before? Maybe others would have, too. “I’ll get outta your hair.” No one says that in Guatemala. They stay and don’t feel bad about it because company is a gift, not a burden. Not a person in your hair.

And then I appreciate things that I didn’t see in Guatemala. I noticed how my parents found the trash can at the end of bowling night instead of dropping their straw rappers on the floor. I recognize that this is a value instilled in me: Do Not Leave Your Trash Anywhere Ever. Guatemala does not have that value…. Or not much of it.

And for the first two weeks, everyday I took a personal inventory of what I felt like doing and what I was ready for. The first two days I stayed within a 1-mile radius of my sister’s house. I walked my her dog Ruby, I walked to the stores nearby. I didn’t turn the key to my car until the third day. Every normal act was an event: walking into Target (that was something I couldn’t handle until day 6), getting my car repaired (that was weird: I just sat in the waiting area and surveyed all the different machines that dispensed things like water and hot cocoa and cappuccinos). When I went to the nail salon (day 2), I almost spoke in Spanish to the manicurist like four times. I’m almost certain she doesn’t speak Spanish, but then again I didn’t ask.

Other big events were: filling up my car with gas, eating at a restaurant and ordering in English (free refills: OMG), well the list could continue but these events are starting to feel normal again now. But at the time, Target was terrifying. I remember walking into Ulta Beauty Store and seeing an entire wall of hair blowdryers you could try. There must have been 35. And I thought that was absurd. I bought a new line of skincare and got out of there. Thankfully when people offer me credit cards, or ask me for money, I say: I just got out of the Peace Corps. How long do you think that will last? One year, like newlyweds, or one month, like newborns? I think I get to decide and I say at least 7 years. At least.

Today (three weeks in) my Mom and I went to a Puerto Rican brunch restaurant and I started to cry shortly after we sat down. I noticed all of the waitstaff, bilingual, and the owner, Puerto Rican, and living the dream that my entire pueblo reminded me of every single day of service: “Take me with you when you go home. I want to go to the USA.”

And these people who are bilingual, who are perhaps immigrants or have immigrant parents, must feel like they are living two lives. But I can’t say how they feel, I’d surely oversimplify it anyway. I just know how I felt in service, being pueblo Spanish-speaking, Tall, Loud and Proud Natalie and English-speaking, Reserved, Pensive and Grappling Natalie all in the same mind and body and life.

How do bilingual people feel? Do they feel that way, or do they even notice it because it’s all they’ve ever known? I don’t know the answer but I imagine there isn’t just one answer. I only know that now I see them and I pause and I wonder. I noticed the Spanish-speaking customers, tried to eavesdrop on their conversations, and noticed how family manifests in Latino groups and how different it has looked to me.

And I sat there with my Mom and we didn’t do anything to get to the US. We didn’t cross borders or ask for signatures or even know what it feels like to be an outsider. We are ‘the norm.’ We sipped our café con leche. It was good. I wiped my tears with the fancy black linen napkin for 5 de mayo. We spent more money on brunch that I would spend on most anything these days, and we left.

It’s all a little bit hard and a little bit beautiful. And doubt is all the other parts. I leave for grad school on Tuesday and start classes on exactly one month back in the United States of America, May 13th.

Tucson or Bust.