Thursday, November 12, 2009

I have a one-track mind lately, cannot think about anything but leaving Russia. There's very little packing to do, and (I have discovered) limits on how much can be planned in advance and from afar. So I'm a bundle of nerves. Growing very apprehensive about reverse culture shock. I sense big feelings brewing. Certainly, people live abroad for much longer stretches than we have, decades even, but nevertheless this experience has been so total, so intense, and so long, it has required so much coping, and claimed my powers of observation so completely, that once I am released from it I know I'll feel bereft. I will flail around for months, I expect, in Virginia, looking for fragments and people from Moscow, trying to remember, trying to get a handle on what happened here. So odd. So ironic. We are transformed, but cannot be sure how yet. 

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