It’s my last full day here. I’ve already outprocessed, and really, I could be back at the hotel- we are staying at a hotel!- sitting poolside, but I didn’t come down here to sit by a pool. I’m working tonight, and then a half-day tomorrow, and then I say goodbye to my friends and to this life and I get on a plane to go home.<\/p>\n
Sean and I used to gauge the places we were living by how easily we could walk away. We’ll have been living in a town for a year or two and casually one of us would say to the other, “Could you leave today without saying goodbye to anyone?” and the other would, invariably, answer yes. If I left here without wrapping my arms around everyone I think my heart would truly break, and god knows that there are already cracks waiting to split in my chest. <\/p>\n
The fire has been lit in me again. The fire that drove me to Peace Corps. But now I’m glad I didn’t do Peace Corps because I know that I can have a greater affect on the world than on a village. I know this. I have to find out what it is, what is next, what is the thing that I could do every day that would let me sleep at night, because I know now that while I’ve been on the path, I’m still far from the destination and I’ll be plagued until I reach at least the outskirts. I have to go home and figure out how to care about my job again. I have to go home, after what I’ve seen, and return to my work advocating for folks who have, comparatively, the world in their hands. I have to go home and, well, figure out how to get through the next few days, and then next week, and take it from there. I can’t help it, I can’t stop it, I belong on the map where the dragons live. I can’t apologize for it anymore, can’t romanticize it anymore, can’t pretend that there is anything else I want to do.<\/p>\n
Every night on the way home from work, my team asks me to sing them a song, and every night, I do. <\/p>\n
Back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s my last full day here. I’ve already outprocessed, and really, I could be back at the hotel- we are staying at a hotel!- sitting poolside, but I didn’t come down here to sit by a pool. I’m working tonight, and then a half-day tomorrow, and then I say goodbye to my friends and to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlwms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}