Sylvia's Journal

It has been exactly one week since I returned home; one week that feels like a lifetime. I have settled into my old rooms and can find things again. I have rediscovered dresses I forgot about and all sorts of knick-knacks that I would never have missed but now that I found them again I don’t know what to do with them: too much of an attachment (too many memories) to throw them out but also very peripheral to my resumed old life.

A storm is raging around the house, making the old wood creak – fall has arrived very suddenly. I am wearing coats and sweaters after days of hot and humid weather. I am not sure what I like better.

I had my hair cut by my old hairdresser of 16 years. She is reading Kabul Beauty School and so can relate just a tiny bit to my stories about Kabul. “Oh, you mean the stuff she describes is real?” she asked incredulously.

In the afternoon we visited Katie, temporarily out of Afghanistan to take care of some health issues. We visited her in her home in Waltham that is full of her five years in Afghanistan. We compared notes about decompressing after returning from years of living with permanent stress, even though we don’t realize it.

My way of decompressing is cleaning cabinets, I think. I have many more to go and I don’t mind. I clean while I listen to a book on my iPod, moving it along as I go from cabinet to cabinet.
We picked up Joe at South Station who trained in from a job in New Jersey and an interview in the big Apple. We had not seen each other in years. He took us out to his namesake’s restaurant (Not your ordinary Joe) and asked me to start somewhere, describing our experience of living in Afghanistan.

I started on Sunday and then worked through the week, our routines. The one thing that I have to get used to is the complexity of living in the US: the endless choices. This stands in sharp contrast to the routines of our life in Kabul, on Sundays, on Mondays (language classes), on Tuesdays (PM meetings at USAID), on Wednesdays and on Thursdays (SOLA).

What did I miss most? My friends and colleagues, the Afghan families we befriended and the students at SOLA. And then some things I don’t miss at all. I wore a sleeveless calf length dress, we had roast pork and a glass of Blue Moon.