somewhere between newark and boston:

I'm giving myself a gentle welcome to the U.S.: Aaron Neville, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan--old, beloved friends, guys my dad loves, too, words I know by heart.

To me, the Newark airport smelled like sugar. Everywhere, everywhere, things to buy. I rode the moving walkway and stared like a voyeur at all the stores, the restaurants, the bars, at all the clean, richly dressed people going into and out of them. Sometimes when I get home, Americans disgust me a little; today, I felt in awe of them, separate and lesser.

So it's old men's voices for me, ear buds pushed in deep to create a seal. I won't be here just yet. On power-cut nights in Kathmandu, with road strikes and taxi-fires outside, I reach for obscure indie rock--of-the-moment-music to make me feel like I'm still part of the things that people my age and nationality are doing. But today, on this sun-lit, too-bright airplane, on the way to meet my parents after five months in Asia, I just want to be comforted.

"This morning" (it was almost forty eight hours ago, now) I was at a five star hotel restaurant, eating Goan pao bhaji in a mini skirt. Just a morning before that, I was cross legged on a Tibetan carpet, eating tsampa under a slowly rotating fan, watching sun patterns on the bare, brown shoulder beside me. And a morning before it was Bagga, and a morning before Calamcute (all four of us sleeping on the floor in one room), and a morning before, Arambol; I woke up on the porch, looking at the ocean. Our toilet didn't have a seat and there was only a bare bulb for a light, but I was happy and didn't care much.

What's a week in Goa, anyway? What's a week of waking up in a different room, a little sandy, a little salt encrusted, still tired, already warming and ready to rise? What's fifteen hours on an airplane? What's crossing the entire globe in a single day? It's something and it's nothing. In a lot of simple and complicated ways, it's just my life: lie to Customs, ("tourism"), spend some time in the states, go back again. Fall in love again, or something like it.

On the plane, I thought a lot about a friend of mine who doesn't know his own birthday. He's twenty seven or twenty eight. He can tell you about your Tibetan astrological sign but he doesn't know his own. (I'm a water pig and my friend says it's going to be a good year).