And in the five minutes waiting to check in, I meet you, so far away from distant Oregon; you ask if the air is as hazy, a brown fog, all over India, but see-I don’t even notice the haze. You tell me you’ve come to find your calling, your life purpose, to meet your spiritual leader. God speed and good times be with you, I say; as I wonder if I’d ever have the courage to go halfway around the world to seek, drawn purely on whimsy chance. You tell me your new name, I’ve never heard it before- it’s a name you created for your new life, a name you’ve legally taken. I stare and wonder- at stories past, at profiles in courage.

From the plane window the river twists and turns, a lazy serpent with a shiny glitzy skin as the sunshine shimmers in tiny waves, the canal cuts straight and narrow past the tiny brown and green patches in shapes not rectangular that I don’t know what they’d be called.

Now I'm back. For now.