All Good Things Must End...

I am missing this place even though I'm not technically gone yet.

Today was really difficult. It's so complicated, my head. Thinking about the future, thinking about the past, the things I did, the things I learned here...

I read a really useful article about breaking up recently. It made me feel a little bit better about this whole situation. I don't know how to explain this, but I feel like not only did I break up with a dear friend, but this whole country.

The worst part is that I haven't left yet. It's like going through a giant ceremony over and over and over. I've never done anything remotely compared to this before.

When I left France, I was extremely excited. The excitement and shock completely overshadowed my pains and grief over not seeing people.

This time, I fell in love with a culture, a people, a religion, a boy, a way of life - it would be so much easier to just think that, "Hey, I came here to meet these people and become one of them." But that's not true. I will marry in the temple. I will not settle for anything less.

It's almost comical, every five minutes or so, one of my arab sisters takes me in their arms and hugs me, in tears. I cried in my Arab mom's lap last night, and in Sanaa's today. Everybody is being extra-special nice these days.

It will be fun to go to Lebanon, but this parting, this saying goodbye, this breaking apart totally completely sucks.

It doesn't matter that we only have one bathroom and nine people. It's not the bathroom that makes a home, or the culture, or the language - I feel so completely overwhelmed. It's pretty much guaranteed that there will never be another person out there who will fully get this complicated emotional mess of a brain...