I peeled of clothing that now stuck to me and showered, feeling as though I had washed off the sweat, dirt, and stench of years of wandering in the desert. I put on clean clothes – a T-shirt and shorts, clothes I couldn’t really walk out of the house in in Tashkent, which seemed so far away, like something that I’d dreamed of and woken up from, as though I’d never really been there at all. I thought about Dorothy returning from Oz, waking up from her dream with the realization that the characters in Oz were like the people she knew in Kansas and that they all had taught her something.

I wondered if there was anyone in New York in my life that was like any of the people I knew in Tashkent. I wondered what the people of Tashkent had taught me on this journey. I couldn’t think of any similarities. I couldn’t think of anything that I had learned, which was to be expected; the part of Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy starts to wax on about what she earned, even the other characters in the film start to look at her as if she’s a bit loopy. Tashkent was so alien, so different. I couldn’t even find the words to describe where I had been, if friends were to ask me, I wouldn’t know what to say. It felt like nothing like here. There was no point of reference. People acted differently, they acted the way they did because there was a different set of rules. I knew that there were these rules, but I couldn’t articulate them, or list them all, or list the few that I could accurately. The only people I felt who could understand it were my friends there, who had seen it, had lived there for a bit. I decided that it would simply be impossible to do the place justice in words, and that I would not even try to describe it. I would stay silent about it in front of friends rather than have my friends and family look at me the way they looked at Dorothy.

The streets here felt different. The heat was different from Tashkent’s dry heat; it was heavy and humid and inescapable. In my shorts, I walked around without fear of untoward behavior. People here didn’t look at me and if they did, our glances would meet in a smile. I was not anything exotic or arousing suspicion or curiosity, just another person sharing the sidewalk with the other pedestrians. I waited in front of Jonathan’s building; I was not alone there -- there were people standing there, waiting, and smoking. You didn’t loiter in Tashkent, the streets were too deserted for that and it might be an invitation for a document check by the police, and passers by would constantly ask you for the time of day, most likely to figure out if you were a foreigner (by your accent) and also to see what kind of watch you wore. I unfortunately, never wore a watch.  ¶ 12:24 AM