"Detoxing" from the latest fix

Still addicted. It's the basis and the theme of a lot of what she writes. This horribly wonderful thing that she is not sure she will ever be able to live without. Her biggest challenge will be to figure out how to fit it in. She moved back to to her home town to settle down a bit. Get a job, buy a house, be around family and eventually start her own. It became obvious after ten years and four moves that it wasn't going to happen if she continued moving around at the pace she was going. And besides, saying good-bye, the inevitable leaving that happens in an expat's life and entering "detox" was just getting to be too much.

However, last week she got on an airplane once again. Headed to the Dominican Republic to celebrate the wedding of a couple of wonderful people and great friends in the city of Cabarete, just outside of Puerto Plata. The beach resort and 85 degree weather were pretty amazing. it wasn't an adventurous trip by any means. Nothing like her last trip, other than Christina was again with her. She got her "hit" instead with the people she was surrounded by that week. On the last day, after spending days on end dancing, drinking daquaries, walking he beach, talking about travel, culture, experiences, sex and all aspects of life, she sat by the pool with one last Presedente beer and sat witness to it once again. Call it astrology where libras and aquarians are matched, call it chemistry where people are inexplicably attracted to each other, call it human nature or free will where people consciously decide who they spend their time with, but she was somehow surrounded once again by the people she needed in her life. By no means were they the people she knew the best at the party. She found those she had partied with during her New York days to be on the opposite end of the pool every day, and rarely if ever did they even enter her mind. The people she was attracted to, the people she wanted to spend her time with were people she had never met before, yet people she felt like she met years ago. They were single, they were married, they had kids, they had traveled, they lived in New York and Texas and on the west coast and in Mexico City. They were 5 years-old, they were 25 and they were 35 and all week she was perfectly "high" because of them. She soaked it in on that last day because she knew she was heading into cold-turkey.

It was just a week away, but in that week she was wrapped all up in the power of travel again. After 5 months of meeting very few people in the home town, it took a foreign country for her to find the people she needs. That's what it's always taken, that or a major metropolitan area. Somehow the home town doesn't provide her with that. She has never been successful in finding what she needs in the place she grew up. Does the "drug" create a false sense of reality? A lot of her family tries to convince her of that. That reality is a job you probably don't want, but have because you need it. That reality is friends that all have their own things to do and you're lucky if you see them a couple times a year. But she wants to believe that she can have it all. The family, the house, the job and the friends that give her a steady dose of adventure, exploration, discovery of something new and companionship that offers new perspective to all of it.

Is life with the "fix" always going to be temporary and fleeting? Something that she is inevitably going to have to say good-bye to, leaving her with a high from which is going to have to crash?

This is when she laughs at herself for being such a romantic who believes and fears that it has to be one or the other. If it's not perfect it's going to suck. Of course a week on a beach with constant reason to party with cool people is not sustainable reality. It's not the place that makes the moments perfect, though. "Turns out not where but who you're with that really matters." She holds onto the hope that the life she seeks can exist in a realistic setting. She just needs to find where they drug dealers are in that damn town.