Goodbye America!

Uzbekistan is a strange place for a gay American to move to. I left a good job, a good city, a comfortable life, a very sweet boyfriend.

The boyfriend, at first, thought he could wait for me, maybe for a year. We would talk on the phone once a week, we would make plans to meet up in Europe. But then he realized that he couldn’t wait. Towards the end of that year, he called and told me that he had started seeing someone else a few months back. I cried. But, literally, within days, I had forgotten about it.

After all, I would wake up every morning in Tashkent with a tremendous feeling of calm, a peace of mind I had never experienced in my life before before. I would wake up realizing that I was somewhere very special and that my life was very exciting, in a way I had never dreamed of. And, I was far, far away from my family -- a complicated family, that seemed to only draw me into their problems.

There was plenty of stress – the stress of making oneself understood, understanding others. I felt at times that I was like a babe in the forest, learning how to walk, how to talk. The stress of coming home and finding that there was no water. Or no electricity. Or when police could stop you for no reason at all on the street and ask for documents. The tremendous stress on my intestinal tract. And, I was completely alone, which was something I grew to enjoy and cherish.

On the other hand, it took very little out there to make me happy. I felt that happiness every morning -- with the sweet calm of early morning, before the heat of the day came, waking up to the rhythmical scratches of the sweeping against the pavement, the bent old ladies endlessly fighting with the desert dust.  ¶ 7:36 AM