Flashback: Last days and last thoughts in Calcutta

Wednesday October 20

    I finished another book, "The three mistakes of my life" by Chetan Bhagat.  It was a quick and entertaining read about 3 guys who started up a cricket shop.  The author is apparently the largest selling English writing author in India.  I was looking for another book yesterday and opened up 80 things you need to know about India and out fell a sheet of paper with a journal entry on it!  I had actually been looking for this entry when I first arrived to Kannur.  I wrote it on one of my last days in Kolkata and had intended to post it in my blog as a transitional entry.  I have written several of my blogs first on paper, as sometimes I think it enhances the authenticity of documenting a travel experience.  Anyways, I probably shouldn't do that as much since I clearly cant keep track of the paper; but here it is, a journal entry written from inside my room in Kolkata in the last days of September……
   
   
    I doze off in the dimly lit salmon-tinted room.  My eyelids flutter as thunder rolls across the sky, and raindrops patter faster on the streets outside.  The midday heat steams away in an evening sigh.  A cool breeze pours thru the windows into the swirl of the overhead fan, brushing wisps of damp hair across my forehead.  My book, The Namesake, rises and falls on my chest, begging to be picked up again…but my heavy eyelids resist.  I will simply just be right now, listening to the soothing splashes in the street, and tiny drum rolls of the Calcutta rainfall.  Good thing I hung up my laundry inside today.  The clouds roll in to hurry the dusk, leaving only the yellow of the street lamps and glowing barred windows to light up the dirt road winding between homes.
    Such a great way to end an exhausting week.  While exhausting, this week has been so rewarding, nerve-racking, and spontaneous.  It started on Monday with me picking my nails and fidgeting around before giving my first lesson to sixty little bright eyed girls dressed in immaculate blue skirts and pressed white shirts.  It ended teaching a different bunch of girls, same smiles and styles, but with a more confident, less fidgety version of myself.      I feel inspired, ready to embark upon the next chapter of my life here in India.  Its weird looking back on where I was a year ago and where I am today.   I was an emotional hot mess--feeling trapped in the possibility that I just might get stuck in the American bubble, about to graduate, desperate for a ticket to anywhere but America, feeling alone.  Here I am in India, across the world, about to teach English to little kids.  This is what I've wanted, and this is what I will do.  I feel so free now, like I can do anything.  I guess my point is that I finally feel alive again, like I've woken up and leaped out of the ditch in which I trudged in for the better part of this year.  I started walking down the road again---riding the wave---head held high.  Let's see where it takes me.