Are geckos the ones who can change colors due to their surroundings?

There is nothing like friends getting engaged to be emotionally fucked. To be really happy for others, while at the same time responding to it so personally. I mean, my god, it has nothing to do with me, but it does cause one to self reflect in ways that are not entirely healthy nor self-compassionate. I feel like Bridget Jones. Eww. "ALL BY MYSELLFFFFFFF" etc. etc. bad songs and wine. Except wine is expensive here.

Naw, I am probably just flippin my lid (is that the saying? I am forgetting everything) because all these tangible life changes in my friends lives contrast against my own changes which are so internal and secretive even to me. I must be growing right? It's this frantic kind of, 'well, how can this not change me... But... am I different? Do I feel different?....(five minutes later: '..and now? Wiser? More kind? More patient?')....

Oh baby, get over yourself. Shake it out, shake it out! I think this calls for some dancing tonight.

I've picked up Indian mannerisms, necessary rickshaw Hindi, head bobble, accent when necessary. They laugh, tease me, say when I get back to the U.S. I'll be "HUH"-ing, and bobbling, and confusing the hell out of my friends. I like it, I feel oddly proud. But I know the truth. A few days into South Africa I will have dropped it, just as the "chai"s and "kawp kun kaaaa" trailed off immediately upon arriving here. It's gecko-adaptation my friend, it's forgotten quicker than I like to admit. I have no recollection of the exchange rate of the Thai baht, and couldn't even remember the name of the Serbian dinnar tough I worried it like a splinter for over twenty-four hours.

It's crazy how I can live somewhere nearly three months and still go a few blocks in any direction and see something entirely new! Street of wood shops, floral curlicue-ing around rockers and window frames- no problem! A "lake"-esque thing with paddle boats for rent- why are you surprised?! How to really know a place? How to know a place you are coming back to? Which is harder? I came back to the city and in 12 days so much changed! A road re-done, my eyebrow beauty salon totally gone- was it a rip-van-winkle trip to Rajistan or what? Will it be more surreal if Portland has changed or hasn't? Questions, questions, and so few answers.

It makes me need to scurry off to the Bagel Shop, get a black Americano with double sugar and immerse myself in working on my article. Yet, here I am, writing to you instead. Writing to myself. After spending 24-7 with friends travelling, I am feeling strangely co-dependent, and though it is not real, feeling a strange vacuum and lack of people to talk to, so am stuck writing to myself instead. I think I was a fairly self sufficient child, always throwing myself into new projects, new cardboard forts to be meticulously constructed and then left out in the rain, plays to write and never be performed, tree houses that I would live in until school started, reality shifted, and I moved on. I feel right now like I am always leaving.