20 Days Out

I'm constantly amazed at how you can find normal life anywhere. Or, to put it another way, you gravitate to that which makes you feel normal, even when life is different.

For example.

Dubrovnik.

Maybe it's being by the ocean again. Being able to walk down to the sea when I need space, or time, or time and space. Standing there against the rocks that spill down into the crashing waves. Getting sprayed with every 7th wave, or something like that. Feeling the need to back my way off the cliff because I was told to never turn your back on the ocean as a kid. And I listened. The sound.


Maybe it's the streets of Old Town. They're old, go figure. They feel it. Especially at night when there isn't anyone around to make you feel like the place doesn't really belong all to you. Because, at moments like this...

...it does.

Maybe it's the fact that there really isn't a whole lot to do. I can sit and read my book for hours. Or I can walk up and down every small, neatly stacked, stair-street, and feel like I've done a lot without having actually done much. Or I can sit out in "the yard" with coffee and good, albeit sometimes ridiculous, conversation. Or I can just enjoy the company of the wonderful people around me.


Maybe it's being in a place where familiarity has continued to come out of the thick cracks. Through random connections, try ten or so, informing me or my family or friends, that, "Dubrovnik? I've been there. It is so great." Through, after my first half hour walk around the city, I inform Carry that "here is a place I feel like myself... kind of like trains," though of course with not as much intensity (nothing but bridges rivals trains in that), but the feeling is still there. Through finding my favorite place to be, and staying there for two hours with music in my ears I haven't heard since a very different time in my life, and at a very different place - oh, Matt Wertz - and feeling okay about it all.


Even though leaving tomorrow seems a million miles away at this point (besides the fact that my packed bag is sitting right next to me), it'll come sooner than I think, and will make the two long weeks I've been here (two weeks feel like a month when it's usually two days to a place) seem like nothing.

But no. Not nothing.