மனசு சரியில்லை (Soul is not well)

Last night, I was speaking on the phone with my AJWS contact in NY and he says, "so, you have 10 days left."  I was like, wait, WHAT?!  10 days only!  Panic!!  But I like it here, I'm happy.  I'm not ready to leave my apartment or my neighborhood. I'm not ready to say goodbye to everyone at the office.  PANIC!!  I can't believe it's really almost time to go.  My work has slowed to almost nothing, but I feel like everything else is just getting going.  My Tamil is improving, I'm making friends and even the bus conductors know me.  I really feel like I live here. 

When I left the US, I was homeless, jobless, depressed, severely heartbroken and didn't feel like I belonged anywhere.  Now, I feel settled and happy.  Why would I deliberately disrupt the life I have made here only to go back to the uncertainties of home?  When I moved to Boston, a place I have known all life, where my sister and my second family lives, to live with my best friend and work in a perfectly suited job, it took me nearly 5 months to even start to feel happy.  When I moved here, by myself, to a completely foreign place where I knew next to nothing about the culture and even less of the language, to work with people I didn't know in a job that I'm not qualified for, I was completely happy within a month.

How could this have happened?  Why do I feel so at home in India of all places?  The way of life in India seems so simple.  It's very hard to explain.  Things are perhaps physically hard here, or sometimes less comfortable, but there is an easy going feeling about them.  Everyone and everything moves slowly, mostly at the cost of efficiency, but more relaxed.  I feel like I fit right in here.  This is where I belong?!? 

But I know in my heart that I can't stay here forever.  I miss my family and friends.  I miss working as a pharmacist (what a nerd!).  And I miss bagels and cream cheese.  I can't really work here (legally) and, although AJWS has offered to pay for my flight change if I wanted to stay for another month, my work at SAATHII is far from fullfilling.  Plus, my dad would kill me.  I know I have to move on, and knowing is half the battle (as all good children from the 80s are aware).

Unfortunately, the other half of the battle (feeling, perhaps?) is going to be a difficult one.  While in India, my heart was able to heal from it's recent break, but only to be set up for another?  I came here knowing it was only a "summer fling", but then I fell in love, unexpectedly.  Oy, what a mess.  I will deal by trying not to think too much about it and just enjoy the time I have left.