My time in California is coming to an end. It’s been a wonderful 4 months; it was nice to rest, to be in the familiar, but now I have to return to my nomadic life, having married into movement, and keep going. I think of that horse, how scared I was, how dangerous it was, but how I leaned into it,  let it take me, and wow, it was one hell of a ride.

I soaked in soft mineral baths and steamed out a week’s worth of wine before following a tiny Korean woman into a wet room where I was placed on a table and for an hour and a half bathed.

At first she scrubbed my skin with what felt like sandpaper, but there was no pain, just the feeling of my pores crying out in ecstasy.

As the steam from the constant running water enveloped us, she took buckets of hot wet towels and used them to rock me back and forth so that I began to feel like a ship lost in a storm, but firmly and wonderfully attached to the waves. Then she took a hose and water poured out on me like honey, and when I didn’t think it could get any better she put watermelon oil all over me and rubbed my aching muscles until I started to melt into the table and truly move like liquid, all while fighting the urge to eat myself. Wrapping me back up in hot wet towels, she covered my face with ice cold cucumbers while deeply kneading my head and then washed and conditioned my hair, which is an incredibly vulnerable feeling that I cannot wait to feel again. When it was all over she sat me up and rinsed my whole body in warm milk.

The great epics of Homer continually talk of kings and queens being bathed. I cannot seem to turn a page without someone being undressed, cleansed with giving hands, and anointed with oil. Not just a custom, but a gift given to those both at home and weary travelers in need of a place to rest.

Not everyone left this incredible experience in antiquity. Korea, China, Hungary, and more still practice this art daily. Imagine the world if we all had to be that intimate with each other. If we had to completely release  into another’s hand.

I miss traveling. It’s so nice to know that there are hidden pockets of foreign cultures right around the corner just waiting to be found.

I’ve been back for 2 months. I felt a tug, or more like I was thrown overboard after attaching my anchor to a speeding boat passing by on its way to refuel and somehow landed here.

Americans are nice. So nice. And they’re everywhere here in America.

I’ve often told people abroad, when faced with not-so-nice comments about my birth country, to think of Americans like puppies. We’re new, young, inexperienced. We can be awfully cute and really like to play. Okay, so sometimes we pee on your rug, but if you just scratch us behind our ears you’ll see our foot stomp as pure ecstasy crosses over our face, and really all we want to do is ride really fast with our heads out the window, panting.

I didn’t expect the refitting to be so awkward. My summers in NY were a homecoming, yet I knew they were a short stop on a u-turn back. This California detour will be a little longer and I find my head doesn’t fit out the window so easily anymore. It’s thicker with the things I’ve seen, the difference I have tasted, so instead of the ride blowing back my ears, I remain in the passenger seat watchful, even as the air feels lovely.

Being an ex-pat is hard. You live alone, isolated from comfort, but it stretches you like silly putty and you start to be able to press against anything and find its image somewhere in the shallows. The more you stretch, the softer you become, reflecting even more, perhaps something now stuck deep within.

I am happy I am back for a while. But it doesn’t feel like a full stop. It doesn’t really feel like home anymore in a weird way. Just another adventure to be had along the road.

To be a writer, I must read. Columbia University gave me my start, but as my life keeps moving forward, I realize there is no return to who I once had been. So to England, Goldsmiths college I went, by way of these keys, and into books I now surrender. In the spaces in-between, I am beginning to write my own stories, my own book of fateful tales.

I won’t be here much since I’ve gone back to the beginning. I will try and occasionally post something if I can find the time to ever look up, but Red Dirt Lattes will be a sleepier joint for now.

I love how Italians eat lunch. The middle of the day is not just a stop to refuel, to grab something on the go, to get to the next point, it is literally in the Italian language a “pause.” You must pause, stop completely, rest.
It was the same in Uganda. Day after day I would marvel at the locals around me, no matter what their job: government official, housekeeper, garbage man; when it was lunch time it was lunch time. Everything stopped. Meals were lingered over in restaurants with those who could afford, or laps with packed meals from home. Each bite tasted and savored and always, ALWAYS followed with tea. Here in Rome it’s coffee, but the lingering is the same. I’ve watched many foreigners become impatient at the end of the meal because the check was not dropped off at the table. In Rome, as well as in Uganda, the meal is not done when the food has been finished, even the tea or coffee consumed, for there is always more pause. To drop a check in either of these places so quickly after a meal is culturally rude. You would never rush someone like that.
I think of back home where even in line at a check-out counter I felt like I was in a race to the end, what end I do not know, but stumbling with my wallet and trying to get bags together, I could feel the breath of frustration on my neck hurrying me along because the person behind me had to hurry along. Now every day I  get to sit for lunch with pieces of Uganda in my heart, Italy holding me up and I say to myself when I start to feel those old feelings of unnecessary motion, “Sabrina, just pause.”