So now that I've told the most important parts of my Thailand tale, I feel like I can start talking about my present life finally.

Except there's not much to tell.

Culture shock is characterized by a euphoric high -- the excitement of every day holding something new and illuminating -- followed by a shocking crash, the realization of how difficult life can be in a society not your own. Reverse culture shock is different; it's much less fun. Where is the giddy joy that flooded through me when I successfully navigated two towns over by train, staring at the blank faces of the salarymen around me? It's somehow not the same, riding the bus from Koreatown to Beverly Hills. There's no triumph in ordering my coffee at the café. Buildings people signs slide by without the jagged hook of the unfamiliar to snag me.

But all is not terrible.

The faces on the bus aren't blank here; I stare and wonder about people's stories. I overhear conversations. I chat with the librarian as I check out yet another book I've been waiting two years to read. I translate billboards in Spanish (Mi cocina, mis reglas) and is it my imagination or does it seem easier than before, some sort of door opening to reveal those three years of high school study just sitting there waiting to be used? The new and unfamiliar, previously intimidating, are as weirdly enticing as the mango-saffron-hot pepper gelato I ate one boiling-hot day in early September.

And there is an apartment on the horizon, a huge event for one so homebody-ish, one who loves to craft and cook. My yarn is still floating across the sea. My kitchen is tucked in a storage container ten miles away. My hands are itching to organize and beautify, but it would be futile to do it in this temporary place.

You think you'll return to the life you left behind and it'll be like someone just snipped you out of the picture for two years, leaving a black you-shaped space, and when you slip back in, it will be almost exactly as it was before. But no matter how you prepare yourself to not fit in, it won't be any easier, this stitching of you back into your life. Thread through the eye of a needle through your arm and back up through this new-old life. The stitches are black and ugly. But soon the seams will close, the stitches will be pulled out. Where you and your life meet there will be a scar, but a thin one, pink and new. Maybe you'll look at it and think of newborn babies and Easter eggs. Fresh starts. Hope.