108 days and 110 Malarone later...

For the past four months, the little orange bottle of anti-malarial medication sitting on my shelf has been a gauge. Before I left, the bottle was completely full - the pills and possibilities seemed both endless and terrifying. The first month, despite taking a pill a day, the bottle seemed to refill itself. I stared at the contents as if by will I could make time pass faster, could deplete the bottle more quickly. But somehow, it has become emptier and emptier without me realizing. And now, at day 108, I shake the bottle and the little group of pills rattles ominously. I'm almost done; the possibilities are disappearing out of reach.

I leave Senegal in ten days, and I have come to the realization that the only thing more difficult than coming here is leaving here. I'm realizing that the "later" that I've been referring to in my thoughts - the later when I'll buy this, I'll go to the beach, I'll try this flavor of ice cream, I'll make paper snowflakes with my siblings - has come to be now. There are only so many tomorrows left, and I've come to the rather frightening realization that there will simply be things that I will not be able to do or accomplish.

And the thing I didn't expect about all of this is how difficult it is to stay engaged the last weeks. Instead of wanting to absorb and do everything, I've been fighting the instinct to mentally check out from my life here. I have been gradually listening to more and more of my American music, reading more English novels, watching American movies, in unconscious preparation for going home. I've been trying to accustom myself to the fact that I will be leaving, so I don't take things for granted. I absorb the smells of the streets, the feeling of the breeze on the car rapide, the sound of the five am call to prayer and the low murmur of my host mothers' prayers.

I am torn between wanting to return to my family and friends and the U.S., a place of which my estimation has grown considerably in the last few months, and feeling a complete sense of loss at leaving a country and a home that I cannot say with certainty I will ever revisit. My host sister doesn't understand. She asks when I will come back, and when I say I don't know, she asks, "Christmas vacation? No, well, January then? So you are coming 'home' in February then?" It's difficult to tell her no. So I have began to respond in Wolof, "waaw, dinaa nibbi, inch'allah." Yes, I will return "home," if God wills it. Inch'allah.