Day 35 (so close now)

I'm still here!  Writing now from a new apartment in San Francisco that can just about fit in the palm of my hand.  It's been some long and trying months since moving back, and I'm still playing catch-up.  So today, a (mostly) straight transcription from the journal:

July 3, 2013
I'm in my tent at our beach campsite just outside Dar es Salam, and I can hear the waves of the Indian Ocean.  

I'm so close now to the place I've been calling 'home' for the past 2 years.  

It's been a long 2 days of driving, and an even longer 5 weeks to get here.  10 days now to go.  The beachside bar at this campsite is lovely, but I'm too happy to be alone, for once.  Though this has been a trip to remember, it hasn't been the trip I thought it would be.  Along the lengthy stretches of road, I've been doing a lot of reading, most recently enjoying the hiking memoir and collective essays of Cheryl Strayed.  What's sticking with me is her reminder, again and again, that the only way to change your life is to set about changing it.  To be better, you must work to be better.  These are the things that we must do for ourselves.  And I wonder, am I the problem in my own life?  

And my thoughts keep drifting back to that sorrowful Canadian- to the reasons why he's so sad and to the conclusion as to whether that sadness is OK.  I think that maybe 'sad' is just a part of who he is, and that it's not eliminating the sorrow that matters but finding a place or it to fit into his life.  I remember another sorrowful someone who once told me that the girl he loves was on Xanax and didn't love him back.  Such is the way the world turns.  We think it should crack or at least stutter under our pain, but away we spin.  And spin.  

Baobab trees tell of homecoming

Dar es Salam