Benim gitmem lazim.

"My leaving is necessary."

For the thousandth time since I came here to Indiana, the "Crossroads of America", I ever-so-briefly smelled something that I can't explain: the sea. I usually write these "encounters" as yet another piece of evidence that I have secretly been huffing model glue whilst sleepwalking. Today, though, it lasted longer than usual, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't well up a little bit. Of course, I could chalk that up to the fact that I have been as hypersensitive as a high-school cheerleader-princess as of late. But I guess I am just usually able to suppress my homesickness better: it's always there, gnawing at me from the inside like one of those fancy Asian colon parasites.

Sometimes at night, when the house is still and my muscles have all relaxed--in that moment just when you are about to fall completely asleep--I hear the nighttime summer winds sighing through the dark pine forests, redolent with the heat of the day and the high smell of warmed pitch. Under my bare feet I can feel thousands of brittle orange pine needles and the mossy stones on the floor of a forest that may not have seen humanity for years. I can feel the brine lapping at my knees as I look through the turbid North Atlantic for the elusive, prized sand dollar. I can hear the winter winds moaning through the eaves of my house there on Larkin Street, half a block from the mighty Penobscot, one of this nation's last remaining salmon spawning grounds. In the saffron-fades-to-crimson sunset over the Western mountains, I hear the cry of the loon over a mirrored lake while drinking a nightcap. And that smell, always the smell, of the wild Atlantic which is in my very backyard.

December. Eight more weeks.

Going home is always so strange; once there, you have no choice but to confront who you were. What I have always been there is happy. That will do me some good; I feel rather like one of those hideous serpents of doom like you see on the Discovery Channel, and I need to shed my skin.

I really really REALLY need to stop listening to this goddamn Sarah McLachlan crap.

For all of you who wrote to me to find out how I am doing, thanks. I am fine. Tomorrow's blog will be just like before, I promise. Tomorrow you will get to hear the story of how I singlehandedly managed to fend off an army of rabid undead with a can of tuna and a 99 cent Bic Lighter; well, that and my baling hook and the Army-issue flamethrower. Also, how I woke up from a sound slumber this morning and I could speak fluent Khmer. And, who could forget how I managed to teach a feral alleycat how to defecate in a toilet, like you see on TV?

Anyway, there's French to be done, and while I would rather impale myself on a white-picket-fencepost than do it, benim gitmem lazim.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom