You Can't Make Mistakes.

Warning: memoir material ahead

I had one of those creepy, sappy moments last night that I always wince at when I hear from someone else. However, it left me with a warm contentedness—something that usually only a Xanax and two whiskeys will do for me before I get on a flight—so I felt it was worth relating.

I was sitting on the Metro, returning from Heliopolis, staring out the window at the city rolling by and suddenly felt completely at home. This came as a shock to me because I’ve been here for a while and it doesn’t often take me very long to acclimate, but there it was.

I’m not talking about some weird sort of assimilation. I can’t really assimilate here. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It involves too much compromise. What I can do is live here, by my groceries at the local places, speak Arabic in an attempt to increase fluency, and learn from everything I see and hear.

I think I just finally, about two weeks before I am set to depart for the States for the summer, realized that I live here now. I think that it may have something to do as well with increasingly solid plans to return and live here for a few more years in the fall.

Back to the feeling, though. It wasn’t like anything suddenly made sense or that I understood something new. It was just the utter normalcy and mundanity of that situation: I was exhausted, and just brain-off gazing out the window at recognizable buildings in familiar parts of the city. I suppose that this is when I should know that I have finally arrived, right?

Just when your marriage, job, academic course, mode of artistic expression, home, etc. becomes a little bit boring, THAT is when you know that it is actually working. When the new-puppy feeling wears off, that is when you have what you really want. Unless, of course, you are the type who wants to always feel like you are experiencing something new and different.

I am not. I prefer the boring train-rides to the helter-skelter variety. They stay on the tracks and you know the stops.