"Choke dee. Choke dee."

In a split second, my breath is gone.

I am standing on a narrow road of white cement slabs. I close my mouth and pull air in through my nose. All that I smell is of earth and oxygen, all that I see is color and shape. Before me are green shoots of rice -- tiny bundles saturated in green within a placid field of earthen walls, topped by a carpet of grass. These walls are the borders from one field to the next. Prepared by diligent human hands, omnipresent cycles of mother nature, now set through a history of planetary shifts and cycles of weather, now meticulously carry the weight. The well-being of a nation rests before me. My eyes, my father's eyes, must change in hue to match the gray sky above; still friendly in spite of overcast billows. In the distance, shafts of sunlight slice through humid cloud openings in places unknown to me, unknown to all except those who backs perhaps receive the blunt weight of heat. In front of me, an abandoned shelter stands on rotted wood stilts at a junction of green borders. A resting place for farmers, it once provided shade but now belongs to the sky and to the earth. Behind me is nothing but the same -- a jigsaw of borders and fields; green, green, and gray.

In a split second, my breath is back.

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Chon invited me to her home. I accepted. I keep telling myself that nothing can happen between us, and that's how the story goes. But to stay in a small Thai village in the far north with acquaintances who have quickly become friends was something I could not pass up.

It is the unknown which I now readily accept, yet in the moment I stepped through the open-fronted house belonging to Chon's "Paw" and "Ma," I began building something that will last. I sat down waiting, and Chon's "Ma" greeted me with a beaming smile and grabbed my forearm, feeling it with a squeeze and welcoming me once and again with the words, "Choke dee. Choke dee," (Good luck. Good luck.).

In the past five days...

I have lived with new friends in a traditional Thai village, I have stared at fertile fields of rice just planted by callused hands, I have listened to Buddhist chants in the early morning, I have sat cross-legged on a bamboo table for three meals a day, I have slept on the floor, I have stared at mountains and fog on rainy northern Thailand afternoons, I have sat comfortably in rooms for hours where words of English are rarely spoken, I have danced in the rain with 100 villagers, I have picked fruit that tastes like candy, I have been laughed at out of care, I have been blessed by grandmother ("Yai"), I have been missed in my absence from the village, and now I have cried.

In the past five days.

Soon, it will have been seven months since I first left my home in Joliet, but I suppose that it is only one of my homes. Now I know that to go back to the north, to the village of 100, would be to go back home.

Life is surreal.