Leaving home is never easy.  Leaving a home and knowing that you are leaving your community for good is even harder.  This was my life this week as I packed up my 6th and final dormitory room from my four years of university over the course of eight hours the morning after I graduated.  In frantic runs to the ZipCar and the storage unit, one Lululemon bag after another piled up in boxes and in my temporary room that I am occupying until Thursday.  It is from this pile that I will carefully select the 20 kilos of belongings that will travel with me on the two-day journey to Dushanbe.  By 20 kilos, of course, we really mean 15, because I will buy at least 5 more kilos of gifts and souvenirs while I am in Tajikistan, I’m sure.

With family and friends punctuating each day, I wonder to myself how will this departure, as not a side-note to a larger university education or job, but rather a transitional interlude between chapters, will register in my mind.  Is this an end or a beginning?  Or is this somewhere in the middle?  Too many farewells have taken place in the past three days to call it exclusively a beginning, but too much is about to happen to call it exclusively an end.

I guess I’ll just have to live in the middle for now.  The middle of my piles of things, that is.