(the following passage is an excerpt from my journal. it's dated May 9, 2003)

Drunk and sentimental. I don't want to go home and forget about these changes, this place, this sky, the way I feel alone and free.
I still have a paper for my women and economic development class and a french final, but I really feel finished. Finished? Can you grasp that? How is it possible to understand that these people, who have helped create pieces of ourself, might slip out of your life completely, that you may never see them again?
How do you say such goodbyes?
How do lives merge, never to even run parallel again? but to be thankful for that one merge, for me to see that I have been happier than I ever have been before. How can I ever thank Morocco for allowing me to learn to fly?

Now this is the present day me:
I am going back to the place that has consumed so many of my thoughts for five years. Five years? Is that possible? I re-read my journal from Morocco, and I can remember everything in such vivid detail. I have physically ached to go back there, and now I am. It's just for a couple days, and I know it will make me want to move there. Places have such a tug on my heart strings.

sometimes, i will get a whiff of cumin and i will become disoriented, close my eyes, and believe, momentarily, that when i open them the rows of orange juice stands in Marrakech (a city of rose colored walls) will stand before me.
Alexandra Fuller has been in the news lately, and along with her Pinedale and Sublette County and i miss the harshness of Wyoming so much. i open my New York Times and am confronted with the dirt and the isolation and that sought after loneliness i lust after here in the land of SUV drivers doing lines of espresso off steering wheels. i miss the bone crunching cold and not having silence be something to conquer. i make so many promises, so many insha'Allahs that i will return - to wyoming, where a garage still holds a pair of long forgotten sandals and Morocco, where a country holds my heart.