I know I don’t have to say it, since the date stamp from my last post, January 8th, to now, May 25th, is clear, but I didn’t write at all over the winter and the beginning of spring. I do have a good reason, though: I nearly died of a wicked kidney infection thanks to antibiotic induced anaphylactic shock, and then I dropped about 15 pounds and felt like a skeleton of me but also a me with a near death experience so stronger even though more frail (keep up).
After that, you would think things would calm it down, but no, Tirana turned on me, and went from charmingly absurd to hell bent on destroying my sanity. I hear that sometimes you can have a delayed, aggressive form of culture shock, but this wasn’t that. I think it was delayed, aggressive grief, and Tirana was the object I could wrestle with. So I destroyed Tirana instead, by simply deciding that it wasn’t real. As it turns out, it’s incredibly satisfying to deem an entire city and everything in it a bizarre apparition- it made so many things make so much more sense.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I certainly have a grip of entertaining stories to show for it, but in the process I wore myself down into a frenetic bundle of nerves and sleepless, dancing feet mania.
The all nighters and street play and new pubs and clubs and friends and roaming like a wild thing was punctuated with unexpected and overwhelming interruptions of sweeping grief that left me on the ground, staring in surprise at the sky, gasping for breath and checking my heart and brain all over for bruises and psychic cuts.
In the mix there was the aforementioned month of sickness, resulting in my spending the week+ before my 30th birthday pissing blood with actual chunks of more blood in it. After a brief and cruel respite that just tricked me into hope, I spent the day after my 30th birthday unexpectedly crawling on the floor screaming in agony convinced my side was going to split open, before being taken to the hospital. The next month was a weird adventure of lingering infection and pondering the potential damage to my kidneys and how much a flight to the UK might be if I were to need such a thing.
Here’s my 30th birthday, after a week of being sick and thinking I was getting better, before I knew that things would get much, much worse.
The best thing about getting sick when I did? Other than having the kind of 30th you dream of, hobbled in pain, oh, yes, I was still not well when my friends came in from the US to visit.
So my friends from the US went to Montenegro with my friends here in Albania, and Bobby and I hung out in Tirana waiting for a urine culture instead, so they could give me antibiotics that wouldn’t kill me. GREAT TRADE.
Here’s where I was for basically an entire month, when I wasn’t in the hospital or the pharmacy.
Things were fine for a bit but now, as I type, a bandage cuffs my left arm, right above the elbow, covering the long, straight cut where a rogue mole was sliced out by my good friends (we’re all on a first name basis now, y’all) at the Spitali Amerikan.
My students are obsessed with looking at the raggedy-ass stitches. My Albanian friends waited until after I had it done to say, actually, you know, they would have gone to Greece. Good to know, y’all.
The winter, and the beginning of spring, were all in all a ramshackle jumble of the best and the worst of what it means to give up one’s home and roam the world living in temporary places, carving out a bit of space upon which to set up camp for a while. That is to say, I had some of the best and worst times I’ve had in a while.
I danced and played and stomped all over the rain soaked city; I lived like a vagrant and reveled in late nights and early mornings and music and books and new faces. I also sobbed and brooded and raged and sulked and frequently picked at the pain from last June, even when I didn’t particularly want to, even when I shouldn’t have, because feeling the pain at least felt like having another shared experience, even though I know the time for that is forever over.
So I’ve been doing what I always do when I find myself on the other side of what might be considered by most to be a pretty hectic and manic swing- I’ve been reading a lot of books and poetry, and listening to a lot of music, and, recently, writing a lot of rambly crap that isn’t very good but feels good to write anyway even though I will never put it here for you or anyone else to read.
I have a new job in Laos, this one is about to end (sadly so, I adore my kids), and summer travel plans are shimmering in the distance but getting closer and closer every day. I can feel the future building itself just off in the horizon. I’m looking forward to getting there.
Let’s catch up, shall we? I’ll be around. Maybe. Okay, probably. Let’s say we’ll see and leave it be. I’m just glad to be up and out of bed. It seems like I’m still getting used to that again, ever so slowly, but I’m getting there. This picture was taken the first day I was able to leave the house, and the graffiti felt like a handwritten letter from whatever is running this thing. Dance on I can do.
Narrator’s note September 2020: Originally published May 25th, 2013 on Blogger. Picture of students above shared due to no identifying features/names associated. Consent was given at the time of photograph in 2012.
