Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [73]
The person I chose to welcome me back from this adventure was my friend Sarah, a world traveler who lived in the neighborhood next to mine. Of her many good qualities, her greatest is that she is always game for just about anything. Almost more than anyone I knew, Sarah loved that I had made this trip. She had lived in almost as many exotic places as she had visited, and I knew she would be sympathetic to the jolt experienced by a returning traveler.
My suitcase had literally fallen apart as I pulled it off the baggage carousel, so I was wheeling it carefully to keep it from disintegrating before I found her. I considered just leaving the whole mess right there and rushing back upstairs to departures to board the next flight back to Asia. As a testament to the magnitude of this journey I’d just completed, Sarah had actually parked her car and come into the terminal, so she was waiting for me as I spilled out in the exodus from the baggage-claim area. Action-oriented person that she is, and knowing how exhausted I must have been, she insisted on hauling the enormous bag all the way out to the parking lot and hoisting it into her trunk. Then she produced a bottle of water and an apple. “You probably need this,” she said. How fortunate I was to come home to the care of such a kind person.
A wise older friend had warned me that most people wouldn’t know how to ask about my journey. “People will say, ‘How was Bhutan?’ but they won’t really want to know,” he had said. “They won’t know what kinds of questions to ask.” I knew that worldly Sarah wouldn’t fall into this category; instead she posed almost too-specific queries about the service on Thai Air and Druk Air and currency exchange and the layout of the new airport in Bangkok. About the food I’d been eating, and the people I’d met. We agreed there’d be plenty of time, after jet lag wore off, to get into that.
She wrestled the mangled suitcase out of the car and upstairs, without my help. We sat and drank some tea, and I was thankful not to have to come home to an empty apartment. It was a Sunday night, and we both had to go to work the next day. I’d booked the return ticket with as little time as possible between my arrival in Los Angeles and my return to work. My instincts must have told me that if I’d given myself a minute to consider it, I might have thought better of it and not gone back.
EVERYTHING AT WORK was exactly the same as I’d left it. There was little to no fanfare at the office. It’s not that I expected or wanted any, but I also didn’t expect the utter indifference. “You’re back already?” asked one of my more harried colleagues, a woman slightly older than me who ended nearly every conversation we had with, “Well, of course you can do that. You’re single.” Most of the others were too busy to notice I’d been gone, much less returned, with the exception of the few dear people I considered friends. Maybe, I suspected, nobody wanted to hear about an adventure they didn’t get to have.
The scramble of the day felt even more hurried than usual. I was constantly on the phone, all in the service of getting the sound bite. Everything moved like clockwork, on schedule, not a moment left to chance. Inside the office and out, it all was too fast, too large. The streets were too busy, the pavement too smooth. As grateful as I was to have more plentiful choices of food, the enormous grocery store overwhelmed me. Everyone took the shiny comforts, the ease of everything around them, for granted. Didn’t they know how charmed their lives were? Even that magnificent view out my apartment window that I used to treasure—now I just wished those San Gabriel Mountains would morph into the snowcapped Himalayas, and that a pack of stray dogs would crowd my ankles