Returning

I apologize for not mentioning this earlier. I also apologize to many friends who should have already heard about this in person. I owe many of you long-due emails, which I will start working on soon.

To make the longs story short, after a 7-year stint in the United States, I've returned to Bulgaria. Permanently. Or whatever that means these days. Getting my MA seemed to be a logical endpoint to my stay and here I am, typing on a keyboard where the cyrillic letters have been used so much that many of them have disappeared.

As you can probably imagine, there are many reasons why I made this decision. Some of them were professional, many of them personal. Mostly, I was tired of feeling alone. Not homesick. Not lonely. Just alone. It is a difficult thing to explain since it sounds like I'm saying that I didn't like living there or that I didn't have friends, none of which is true. I have loved almost every single minute of my stay in the States. I loved what I did, what I learned, what I saw, the places I visited. I know I could have never done it if I didn't leave Bulgaria. Also, many of my closest friends are people that I've met in Sewanee and State College (hello, you know who you are!) and god knows how much I love each and every one of them. But I had to leave.

It had nothing to do with being sick, miserable or unhappy. I don't have anything particularly stable to fall back on now that I'm here. I don't even know if it was a good decision. In moments of doubt and panick I think I made a mistake. But most days it somehow feels right. And I know it sounds terribly corny, but there's just something about this place and its people that make you feel right at home, whoever you are and whatever it is that you do.

I'll keep you posted how things go.