I can say, "I'll come back to Laos." And I can come back, especially because I'm me: fearless, pragmatic, willful, resourceful. Knowing me, I'll study Lao online and then find a Laotian expat community and get a language partner, and next summer I'll spend a month here and the summer after that volunteer in a school.
Who am I kidding; knowing ME, I'll write a to-do list with all those things on it and then show up at the last minute with a one-way plane ticket, three American dollars, and a wet bathing suit, expecting someone to bail me out.
But regardless of how I come back, I can never come back to it THIS way, where I'm so in love and everything is ahead of me. This way, where everything is unknown and dripping with meaning, magic, and the unfamiliar. This country has given me something I never, ever thought I'd have again. It has given me Costa Rica, in the earliest days when that was the bravest and most exotic thing I had ever done.
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