By Laura

Dear Mom,

...As for me...it's like that one book...How do you inscribe difference without bursting into a series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of yourself and your own kind? without indulging in a marketable romanticism or in a naive whining about your condition...well here I go... I feel very disconnected from everything-most mornings I forget where I am and I go for long aimless walks and don't look around me so I don't remember where I've been. I don't have any close friends here, even though I have lots of acquaintance friends. But I feel especially misunderstood-categorized quickly into preformed boxes and yet still oppressed by all the attention I get for being a foreigner (and attention from PCVs who have nothing better to do than gossip). Like I can't even just go in the kitchen and boil water without my host family asking me if I want help or what I am doing. Everywhere I go there are people and I just want solitude, but I can't find it and I can't seem to change my circumstances. I still feel like there's much yet Georgia has to teach me but I miss college.
Anyway...
Laura

P.S. From Margret Atwood. This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it...if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, half-colours, too many.