Feels Like Home

I step out onto the tarmac and the familliar firey breath that envelops me tells me I'm home. It's jut like arriving in one of my other hot weather homes half way accoss the world, except the immediate assault of cigarette smoke and the shrill sounds of head scarfed women shouting animatedly at each other puts me in only one place. Amman. Jordan. Back in the Levant.

In the taxi home I converse clumsily with the driver, but even with my limited vocabulary I feel like a poet laureate- the ease with which my well practiced sentances slip out earns me praise. They're easily impressed, the Arabs- so few visitors learn more than Hello, Goodbye and Thank you, if that, so a simple comment on the weather can amaze. I am returning for the third time and there's something more than the warm wind that welcomes me to reassure me that somehow, at least in this moment, I belong here.

Summer, too, has arrived. The snow and sleet that greeted me months ago is a distant memory, and the long grass growing alongside the highway is the color of my sun bleached split ends, the color of a camels coat, bright glinting caramel, swaying in the sun.

I had planned to stay only briefly, to wash my filthy crumpled clothes, repack and make for yet another border in less than 48 hours time, but I decide then and there that I need more time to reacquaint myself with this city, so maligned by the international community ('disappointingly gray and modern', thanks Lonely Planet) and yet, to me, so bright and comforting.

It feels like a betrayal to be spending my precious hours here concocting an exit strategy, which is less than straight forward and likely to be lengthy and frustrating, thanks to the stamps in my passport. But I have to do it, to leave again, resisting the magnetic pull of all that is comforting to search for the unknown.

You will lure me back and we will snap into place again until wrenched apart, for the final time.