leaving a place: good bye or good riddance?

The result of having an insatiable wanderlust and being exposed to travel at an impressionable age, I have traveled.   

Maybe it was that stealth trip to Lake George and Montreal or maybe it was that first epic journey junior year in high school to Daytona Beach and the Bahamas.  Or was it the early fascination with the Grateful Dead and the touring lifestyle?  What ever exact experience, or culmination of experiences, I have become a person that has moved.


In moving, the positive of saying hello to a place, in all its entirety is one of my favorite parts of the experience.  Discovery, piecing together a place and the slow creep of self-assured familiarity are all things that I can take in large doses.  But of course, to experience this anew, one has to leave a prior place.  The leaving of a place has, up until this point, been a difficult process.  Saying good bye to friends met, recognizable places, familiar ways...and all the people and things that made up the background canvas of your life....has been hard. 


But then I experienced Saudi Arabia.  A difficult place and a difficult existence.  Now before I wax negative, it must be said that my choice in coming here was not an innocent one.  The motivating factor for coming here was the coin.  So here I state at the beginning the driving force of me coming here was unlike any other time in my life, a desire not for culture, but cash.

And I remember, after signing the three year contract, that I felt as though I just signed away three years of my life to a prison-like existence. 

So how has this changed my usual feelings of leaving a place?
For the first time ever, I am leaving a place without the normal melancholia.  In fact, I am overjoyed at the prospect of leaving this desert of a life.  This man is ready to escape this dune.  I temporally submitted to get me through the past three years, but only as a way to survive.  I am ready to shed this place, and carry on.

I am five weeks away free.