Rain and reality

It has started raining.

Everyone told me it rained before I came back and I should rejoice, scantily clad in Esplanadi at the two days of sun that greeted me on my return.

But now it rains and the sky has fallen grey and will be grey to midnight. And each rain drop says "you're back you're back". It hammers into the window and mocks me.

Returning has been so hard. It's always hard. Adrian and I used to suffer terrible post travel blues after Croatia, Greece, France. We would refuse to eat ordinary food, we'd drink and eat imported stuffs and stick photos of happy memories on our fluro-lit desks at work and come home and scowl and sulk.

Now I scowl and sulk alone and the bottom lip drags on my wooden Finnish floors, and my crossed arms and silent face blend with the Finnish crowd.

I went to the Outback bar and saw the empty shaken eyes of another foreigner out of love but still in Finland and I felt for them the pain of broken dreams. "I'm working 250 hours a week!" he said and I thought "be grateful because over-work and exhaustion is better than contemplating the reality of being here on the other side of the world with far too many Ks and Us in your sentences and no love".

The rain falls harder now, rain without character, not like the fat hard drops of Cappadoccia.

I console myself with the emails, texts and photos of Turkey of friends made in a handful of moments, longer lasting and stronger than those attempted in more time in Finland. I lose myself in my shrine of postcards, and photos and travel souvenirs, rocks and restaurant cards, and my last glasses of visne suyu. Monday, I tell myself, Monday I will be ready for Finland.