January 28 - The Trip Home

I'd been dumped by my long distance girlfriend the previous weekend, and I had gone into the capital city both to take care of some business and also to be with some friends who might understand what I was going through.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer at the time, living in a primarily Muslim town in Central Asia. The people there were nice, but it was a place where most marriages were still arranged, and so I didn't expect that most people would understand what it felt like to get dumped. Lucky bastards.
I'm not going to waste any time telling you how I felt. Think back to the most painful break-up you've ever been on the business end of, and then put yourself in an environment where there are no bars, no possibilities of rebounds, and very little that will take your mind off of how rotten and hopeless you feel, and that's about where I was.
My host family tried to help. They told me that maybe she would change her mind, but I knew she wouldn't. It didn't help that letters she'd mailed before the break-up were still arriving. They used words like "miss" and "love" and all may as well have come from another century. But I read them anyway because that's what you do when you feel like hell.
The trip to the capital did me good, though. I saw friends and got to talk about it because for some reason that's what I wanted to do. Talk about it. Wallow in it. It helped, but not really. At least I got the words out of my system.
At the end of the weekend I had to go back to my town, back to my job. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, your morale really goes through cycles. When things are good, it's just like the commercials make it out to be. You in an exotic environment surrounded by locals and you're happy to be around each other. But when it's bad, it's really bad. You don't see any point to your being there. You believe--you know--that none of what you're doing is going to make any lick of difference in the long run. You feel isolated and cut off, and you can't for the life of you think of any good reason why you should stay in your position. At one point you were new and interesting to the local population, but you'd long since lost your novelty. Now you were just kind of there.
That's where I was in my morale cycle as I got on the bus and started heading back to my town. Under the best of circumstances, a bus trip in Central Asia is tolerable. These were not the best of circumstances. It was overbooked, so I had to stand. It was hot and dusty. An hour into the trip, we still hadn't made it out of the capital because the driver kept making unscheduled stops to pick up stuff for friends and acquaintences. The exhaust was blowing in through the open windows. It was loud. I hated everyone.
There was a flat tire, and it took more than an hour to change it. Nobody else gave a shit. None of the stuff that was annoying the hell out of me bothered them, and that just made me hate them more.
Back on the bus. At this point we should have been almost halfway there, but we were barely 15 minutes into the trip. The shocks were shot to hell and we bounced all over the place. The exhaust was stifling. I felt hungover even though I hadn't had anything to drink the night before.
A man behind tapped me on my hand, and I hate it when people touch me. What did he want me to do, move up? There was no place to go. I ignored him.
He tapped me again and I turned around and glared.
He had a picture in his hand that he seemed to want me to see.
I looked at it. Group of guys standing in front of some building. Great. I nodded and handed it back to him.
He wouldn't take it. Instead he motioned for me to look at it again. Jesus Christ, this guy. OK, fine. I looked at it again and this time I saw what he wanted me to see.
I was in the picture.
It had been taken a few months back when a few other Volunteers and I were taken on a tour of a local teacher training school. They'd proudly shown us their classrooms and prepared a lavish lunch for us. At the end of the afternoon we posed for a picture and here it was: myself, a few other Volunteers from my area, some local teachers and teachers in training, and the man who had handed me the picture.
I was so taken aback by being in the picture that I temporarily forgot how much I hated everybody. I looked at it again and managed a smile at the absurdity of the coincidence. After another look, I handed it back to the man, but he wouldn't take it. He wanted me to keep it, and after a few more offers I did, and I thanked him, and we talked for a little bit.
And that was it. He had just wanted to give me the picture. He didn't want to ask me for a favor or practice his English with me or do anything else. After our brief conversation ended, he returned to chatting with his friend who was sitting next to him.
And the rest of the bus ride was cake. The temperature cooled down and enough people got off the bus for me to get a seat. The late afternoon view of the Kopet Dag Mountains, though not breathtaking, was genuinely pretty. People in the seats around me drifted off to sleep.
When I got back, my host family had just sat down to dinner and I joined them. After dinner we watched TV, and even though the programming in that part of the world isn't anything special, that night I didn't mind it.
I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I was completely cool with the breakup from that point on because I wasn't. It hurt for a long time and the pain disappeared very gradually and reluctantly. But that evening, at least for a little while, things were OK.