Less than three weeks to go

My time here in Mexico is winding down... I can't get my head around it. Rob told us that the two hardest things we'll do this semester/year are get on the plane to come to Mexico and get on the plane to go home. I never really had a problem with coming here... it's just not my style, I guess. And others may (and have) scoff and snicker at the idea that I think I'm (mostly) immune to culture shock, but I have witnesses who concur that I never really had a problem adjusting.

But going home... that's going to be tough. Mexico has become my life. I have evolved and become a different person than I was in the United States. I have made new friends and learned to dislike new people. I have new foods, new routines, new preferences. I have new emotions and opinions and mannerisms. How can I pack all that into a box and bring it home with me? I'm over my luggage limit as it is.

Soon I'll be home with all the friends who were my friends a year ago, and they will expect me to be the same guy they remember. I'm not him. I won't want to do the same things, I won't wear the same clothes, I won't hang out with the same people. I'm afraid it will be like when I go back to Goshen and realize just how bad my life was back then, and how good it is at Manchester. Is Manchester going to be a painful memory too, now that I've had Xalapa?

I like to run away. To leave everything behind. That isn't a problem for me... the problem is going back and seeing the pieces of that old life and not knowing how - or particularly wanting - to pick them up.

Here and now, in these last weeks in Mexico, I'm sort of torn between loving life and hating just about everything that's happening in it. Ironic, huh? I think the downside to this blog being read strictly by people who know me is that I can't write about any of them. If I do that, people will start avoiding me like the preacher on a Friday, and for the same reasons. Yet people are such an intricate part of my life, especially right now.