The program is over. My semester in India is done. I'm sitting on my bed in the ashram, roommate and fellow faffer on her way to London, and then home, other students eating at the program center and saying their last goodbyes. I was going to go, but didn't. I couldn't quite bare saying goodbye again to those I'd already spoken too, but more importantly didn't have the energy to try and make something meaningful of the relationships whose coming to a close I'll lose no sleep over.

I probably won't ever see you again. I will miss the idea of you more than the actual you. Sometimes you were funny, but mostly you just hurt my feelings. Bye.

I did say goodbye to Gwen. Her bed is messy and looks as if she just got up to go to the bathroom, a little burrow for her likewise little body to snuggle back into. But its daytime, no matter how much my body disagrees, and Gwen has vacated her bed for new shores, and I sit here on my bed, looking at hers, taking comfort in the fleecy side of the sleeping bag that has been my comforter for the past two weeks.

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I remember looking at colors when I was younger. I would look at the sky, and see all the different blues and grays and whites, and think, If I could only cut off that little tiny square of color, that would be just one color of blue. So I'd cup my hands around that tiny square, and look through at that one blue. But it's not just that one blue, I'd think. It's that blue, plus the pink of my hands. So I'd think, well, if I could just get at that one piece of sky, look at only that, it would be just one color. I would try narrowing my eyes, squinting up at the sky. That didn't work either, because I saw the fuzzy pink edges of my eyelids. I came to a conclusion in the end. There is no one color on its own; it just doesn't live in our world. There are only many colors together. I realized that, even if I did exclude everything but that tiny patch of sky from my entire field of vision, it still wouldn't be just one color. It would be different blues, subtly different but varied nonetheless. And anyway that it wasn't possible. I could never look at just one color at a time.

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How do you think you've changed while being in India? Do you think you're different than when you came?

Uh, I don't know...

I suppose* we're always changing. Nothing is static. The only thing that is constant is change.

This trip has been most alarming for me in the distance between what I expected it to be, how I expected it to feel, and what I felt. When asked how I've changed, or how it has been adjusting to India, I'm always somewhat baffled.

Well, um...

The thing that has alarmed me most is how un-alarming it all has been. How it has felt so familiar, how it hasn't really felt like a change, except in the community which has become mine this semester. Why is it so surprising that we are ourselves no matter where we go?

How have you changed this semester.

I don't know. You tell me.

When you look in the mirror from day to day, you're the same. Is that true? I think so, in general anyway. It takes a time lapse to see a difference. It takes that uncle or your parents' friend to say “You're so tall!” So when you ask, how have you changed, I can only look at myself and shrug my shoulders. The implication that I ever knew who or what I was in the beginning is somewhat mystifying...

What will you miss most about India?

What?!

The idea that India could be anything less than totally overwhelming and all-encompassing is beyond my comprehension. Besides, to decide what I'll miss, I'd have to identify what exactly India is for me, where I end and where India begins. I don't know that I can do that.

What will I miss? The rickshaws? The pollution? The things that at home might make me cry which make me chuckle and roll my eyes? Gosh, I don't know.

All the “things” I could say seem superficial. And I almost feel like everything that India has been and is to me will come home with me, wadded up in between the dusty and hastily-rendered Hindi that hasn't fallen out through the cracks and all the colors.

NOTE: The photo just above was taken at the beginning of December. The photo way above was taken in mid-September. On the left is my roommate Anna, and on the right the program coordinator Dheeraj. That person in the middle though, who is that??

*Supposition is what we do. What I do here anyway. Redundancy is sometimes necessary. Or sometimes it just is.