Holes

And just like that, it ends.  When I walk out of the Peace Corps office today, I won't be a volunteer, twenty-six and a half months in Peace Corps Albania, ended.   I've been saying goodbye for three weeks.  My life is a mesh of holes.  When the new volunteer came to visit two weeks ago, I introduced her to more than 50 people in three days, and those were the ones she would want to know the names of from the beginning.  Last week, I said goodbye to those people and more.  Now, I'm saying goodbye to the Peace Corps staff and volunteers as I see them, leaving holes.

I have had some poetic beginnings and endings.  The same volunteer I roomed with at staging in Philadelphia, I roomed with now at the end.  She left at 3am for the airport.  We ate her last dinner at Serendipity, the restaurant at which I ate my first meal in Tirana.  Four other volunteers from my group were there.  I said goodbye to three (and said goodbye to them again this morning).  Clearly, I'll see some of these people again.  Skype, Facebook, and email have made the world smaller but not small enough, and so I have holes.

Two of the volunteers made postcards that have an Albanian expression, roughly translated it's,"Mountains don't meet, but people meet one day."  It's not forever, and even with all my holes, I feel like more of a complete person than when I arrived two years ago.  It's time to move on and start filling those holes.  My life will never be the same, but I wouldn't want it to be.