When I first returned from Mali, and up until today, I haven’t worn mascara on a daily basis, like I had for the 10 years leading up to my departure, because every single day, I wept. I didn’t cry. I wept. Heaved. Sobbed.
I had left a country that I had involved myself with, eaten the food we had sown, bathed with precious water, slept under heavy stars, read my way through terror inspiring rain storms, sweated out sweltering, unforgiving heat, and befriended beautiful people with a different tounge. I had come home to a place of impossible beauty and bounty. To a family and a loved ones and dear friends and precious pets and a welcoming community and was entirely lost within my head, my heart. Everything felt overwhelming. Everything was heavy and dripping with memories. I slept outside because I couldn’t handle walls for a few months. The walls of the canvas tent swayed and put me to sleep like the breezes that would meander through the screen of my bug hut, under the same stars, just somehow much further from them.
As symbiotically replenishing as a good, thorough cry can be, these I believe have officially lasted long enough and are, as of today, Skylar’s 30th birthday, 4 February 2010, over.
The days of the big lashes are back. Lovely.
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