My departure from Sri Lanka was understated. I said my goodbyes to Kara and Keven, dismissing the sentimentality. “I’ll write you an email”, I replied, a cheap reference to an interconnected digital world. I should have said “I’ll miss you too”, but that might have been to close to the loss. The taxi had arrived early, and only as I sped off to the airport did I realized how much of a home Sri Lanka had become.

One red-eye later, I am back in Bangkok with the strange obligation of taking a vacation. As my cab slowly worked its way through downtown Bangkok toward my hotel, I couldn’t help but feel a recently familiar anxiety.

“You can always change your tickets,” Keven said when I told him that part of me felt anxious to get back to the United States. Skeptical that he was implying that I should once again extend my stay in Sri Lanka, I reassured the status quo, and my vacation, by quickly adding “it will be good for me.”

But it is more than this. I am not just leaving the country, I am also leaving my job and my life in Salt Lake. While out of the country, I received a job offer inviting me to come work at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. It seems this association, where I have been teaching, would like me as a Senior Programmer. The offer is good, the opportunities and timing are right, and while I have logistically accepted the offer, I am waiting for my emotions to catch up. I find myself asking existential questions. “Why do people leave?”, “Why do people stay?”, and “What makes something a good decision?”

Ted, my boss, had sent me an email a few days before in response to my resignation. “I believe that the best decision would be to have Kara steal your passport and ticket back to the US and keep you trapped in Sri Lanka as a slave under corporate ownership. However, for some reason that seems to be socially unacceptable.

“Although you will be leaving our firm,” he continued, “I prefer to think of your departure as an indefinite ‘leave of absence’ or sabbatical.”

And so I leave knowing that if I don’t like D.C. I can always return. But I know that I will, and so I won’t. Paradoxically, that is the problem.

Cheri, the Brooklyn based massage therapist I met at 30,000 feet on my last trip to D.C. had sent an email informing me that my emotional moon sign was Cancer. I couldn’t help but think of my brother-in-law. “Cancers, we’re crabs,” he once said, pinching his hands like ad-hoc claws, “we build nests.” And he would begin to dig in the imaginary sand. My temporary nest in Seeduwa now abandoned, returning to Salt Lake promises an emotional security that Bangkok will make me temporarily forego. But even that nest in Salt Lake now seems somehow insufficient.

I received the job offer last Saturday, minutes before I waltzed out the door to Sri Pada. However, as the train lazily climbed the hill country, my excitement slowly gave way to the emotional implications of my impending move and the existential questions took on a different tone. “How can people leave?”

Restless before the climb, I laid in bed wishing in vain that life would somehow slow down long enough for me to regain my footing. A brief respite before the next adventure was all I wanted. Simultaneously optimistic and saddened at the change, I searched in vain for a way to mourn a loss about which only I knew, knowing that if I could just break down I would get the catharsis I so desperately needed.

Instead I was left with questions, most importantly this: “What makes home?”

Funny, I suppose, that crabs build nests in something as impermanent as sand.