Where am I?

I've been back for almost 48 hours now. Did it really happen? Was I really living in Spain for 6 months? I'm a little jet lagged, a little numb, and for the most part, I don't seem to understand that this isn't just another weekend trip away from Madrid. I really left.

I went grocery shopping with Mom and aunt yesterday, and found myself saying "perdón." When Dad told me some silly local news tidbit, I wanted to react with "Dios!"

The latest addition to the house is a handful of Kannada language TV channels, so I've gone from constant Spanish to constant Kannada, and I am beginning to feel an acute sense of loss.

I keep logging into my work email, out of habit. My first night back home, I woke up at 2 AM and chatted and Skyped with my Spanish friends and coworkers. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night again, but did not feel like speaking to anybody.

I turned on my US cellphone at the airport, but it left me with such a sense of uneasiness and anxiety, that as soon as I found my parents at the airport, I switched it off and hid it somewhere. I don't want it. I don't want to be connected. Not yet.

I had a direct flight from Madrid to Los Angeles, a full 13 hours in the air. It was as uncomfortable and unpleasant as my 8 hour bus ride from Barcelona to Madrid a couple of months ago, and maybe that's why I don't seem to grasp the permanence of this move.

I wrote this a month ago in Madrid:

"I can feel it ending. My 6-month honeymoon with myself. I feel the small cracks spreading out as that other reality presses in. I've been left alone for 6 months, and I don't know how I'll survive the change in habitat."

During the flight back to California, I started and read the majority of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which put me in an understandably depraved state of mind. Maybe finishing Lolita will set me free and snap me out of this daze.