Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.

It’s been a long fucking time since I wrote just to hear my own words in my head.

There are words I like the sound of, that stir my heart for reasons I can barely understand. I like travel words – a hundred miles of bad road, night train to Brownsville, and the ferry across the red sea before you catch the bus to Jerusalem.

Midnight train to Georgia is probably my favorite song in the world. Travel and love. What more is there?

Yeah, I’ve been to Jerusalem. I have been lucky in my life. More than I deserve. More than anyone deserves, really, but luck is not for the deserving, it’s for the lucky and apparently right now, that’s me.

It’s 11:54, and I am lying in bed in Ashgabat. Tomorrow I fly back home to Tashkent.

Be prepared, I feel no obligation to have this entry make sense.

Thinking of ships passing in the darkness, and the horns that the freighters sound on the St. Lawrence River to avoid collisions. Freighters make noise – a deep, deep, throbbing noise of powerful engines. You don’t hear it during the day because it’s an underneath noise that is drowned out by everything else but at night you hear it clearly and I can never quite believe that I miss it in the daytime.

I got married by the St. Lawrence, and probably a freighter passed by.

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea.

I am lucky I found Kir. Lucky because he’s good for me. Because if he was wrong for me, I’d stay anyway.

He’s not wrong for me, and this is not a cry for help. Nobody worry, that’s not what I mean at all.

But I know who I am and I do not walk away from love. That’s the thing about love, for me, I stay. Past all reason, I stay. Even when I know it will never be what I want, I stay. Because it has never been a choice. Love owns me.

It’s entirely possible that I moved back to Tashkent because I missed Mike and Gulnara. I am owned by more than one kind of love.

So, Kir, that’s not wisdom on my part, not maturity or sanity, just luck. Found what I needed and now I have something that deserves all my powers of devotion.

I have not, in fact, ever been at sea, unless you count the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea or splashing in the Caspian, which I don’t. I have flown over the sea, which may count for something.

But I’ve never been so far out you can’t see land, never traveled for days on the ocean.

On Sunday we went to the mountains, and we were the only people in the valley, the only people to be seen. There was absolute silence and the world could have needed and we wouldn’t have known.

Yeah, you all think I’m crazy now, but I was getting bored with linear thought…

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.