Resurrection

I toss back and forth so much so that Aaron elbows me to get my attention.

"I can't fall asleep. I'm anxious...sorry babe" I whine.

"Why don't you take a benedryl? It'll hel..." Aaron mutters as he drifts back to sleep.

Thoughts shuffle through my mind like an old slideshow reeling from picture to picture. The images get bigger and bigger and the noise clicks louder and louder until I am consumed by their force. I can feel the pressure slide from my head to the tendons in my neck. I try my routine, bedtime breathing with ten, short breaths and four deep, cleansing ones, sinking my fingers and toes into the soft mattress. Like a dose of anesthetic, I'm asleep in the blink of an eye.

A monsoon sweeps through the dusty city hitting the metal pane of my bedroom window. The talking outside is muffled by the curtain of rain. I'm suddenly lost in the drone of a woman speaking Kurdish through the thin walls of my apartment. The rain beats harder, the wind shakes the awning outside, back and forth, until it flies off and smacks the window of the chai shop. The pieces of glass fly up as my bedroom shudders swing open and I'm assaulted by a thousand shards of pointed daggers.

I jerk awake, catching my breath, I feel for scrapes.

"Are you okay?" Aaron whispers.

"I'm fine, just another one of those dreams."

I lie awake a few more minutes thinking about our move to India, the most likely culprit of my night terrors. I'm lost somewhere between three worlds. Pieces of me died in foreign places, then were reborn. It's here in this bed that thoughts were birthed and watered until they took shape, distilled from an imaginary story played out as a child, morphing into a reality that rivals my wildest ramblings. Where options are endless like a blank script in a room of screenwriters. Travel. I'm seduced by its perfume and poison, falling victim to the possibilities.

Where there is tea, there is also chai. Quaymaq chai like muddled grass, steaming out of a wide-mouthed clay cup. Or a Kurdish chai as black as tar, infused with cloves, anise, cardamom and black pepper. Masala chai with ginger, cinnamon, cardamom and creamy milk. Where there are cars, there are also Bactrian camels, cycle rickshaws, and towering elephants. And where there are rolling Ozark hills, there are also the rugged peaks of the Zagros, the high desert plains of Erbil, and the azure waters of Varkala.

"We are what we eat", goes the old saying. It is irreversible what I've done to myself. I've been dipped in a bucket of dyes and have come out striped, resurrected a hundred times over from assaults by strange cultures. I am flying in again, clipped wings and all, whether reckless or justified, unpopular or endorsed, it is my duty as dreamer and my devotion as lover: to write, to travel.