At the Bozeman airport, we were met by my mother-in-law, naturally thrilled to have us return, and my neighbor, who had a pick-up truck that could handle our load of luggage. When I got into his car (my family went with her), he asked me, “So, did it change your life? Are you completely different?”
I confess that the question stymied me a little. It fit into a narrative structure I couldn’t quite inhabit. I wanted to say yes – I am supposed to say yes – the answer to the question, probably, is yes. But I didn’t – jet-lagged and awestruck by the landscape I truly do love, I muttered something I cannot remember.
But Laura hit it on the head the other day when she said that it is not leaving that changes you, it is coming home. I still can’t answer my neighbor’s question – I still don’t how I am changed – but I know that I could see nothing until I landed in Bozeman, until we started mustering the energy to re-engage with our lives, our friends, our work.
I don’t want to trivialize an experience I cannot empathize with, but let me just say that the return has given me a new appreciation for the displacement and weirdness a veteran returning from war must experience. I have had nothing of the intensity of combat, so I don’t mean that, but every day – several times – I have these visceral images that pop into my head from my time in Indonesia. It’s like I am there again, and it is nothing profound or overwhelming, except in the directness of it. I remember the small door, on the third floor, where I would sit sometimes, while a deluge came on the balcony beyond. I remember the smell of the sate stand, or the sound of the chicken noodle soup seller, or the mountain, vivid and neatly outlined in the sunrise, or a conversation with Ibu Yani at the store down the street. It’s a deep physical memory, and I have never experienced anything like it. I never had this experience in Salatiga, about Bozeman, perhaps because Salatiga was so strange to me, such work to even negotiate, that I didn’t have time. But when I return to Bozeman, the normalcy of everything, the familiarity, gives license to the most vivid imagistic memories I have ever had.
Today I spent my time banging on my back patio with a sledge hammer, breaking down the concrete so that we can put up a usable space back there, protected by the sun – hard work that I could have spent $5 to have someone do for a day in Indonesia. (I’m not bragging, or happy about it – it’s just the price there.) I’m also doing things like planning my fall class – like reading scholarly stuff – but I don’t know yet how returning has changed me. I just know that here I am, and it is the coming home that is more jarring than anything. I didn’t believe it when people told me this, but I think it’s true.
I didn’t expect to write much more after we returned, since, after all, the experience is over. But I suspect I have a little bit more to say, and at the risk of being overindulgent, I will go ahead and say it. Perhaps it will be tedious, and mundane, and normal – but I am realizing that no matter how reflective I was while we were in Indonesia, it’s almost as if the story of our year began again, when we landed. And the worst thing would be if the year simply dissipated, like a dream you see only the smallest shape of. I hope I won’t let that happen. So bear with me, or stop reading. That would be okay too.
