My brother listens to Elvis Presley in the morning before heading to work. I can’t think of a better way of staring the day…

***
My stay in Yerevan this time around has been very quiet and rather uneventful. Aside from family oriented stuff, my little vacation has been somewhat lacking (for the better of it) as compared with the previous years in the sense that, thank god, no weird shit happened during this trip. I consider it an upgrade. Blame the fact that at this day and age I do not think that bar hopping is going to give me anything that I haven’t seen or done before, blame the fact that I am way too old (and jaded), but these days I rather spend my evening drinking tea in a small company than take Peace Corps on a field trip to a local strip joint. So I apologize for the lack of juicy and eventful accounts on my trip. After all, the primary purpose of my visit was to spend time with my family and during the past three weeks I have been doing just that. It was important for me to spend as much time as I possibly could with the two people who I love more than anything in the world, instead of spending a night after another in some sketchy establishments, talking to strangers…

***

Even though I spent most of my time at home, I was able to notice a few of the changes that had taken place in Yerevan. In the past these changes were hostile and discordant; this time around they were no longer sharp and drastic - it appeared to me that life here has acquired some kind of regularity. People appeared quieter, more relaxed, each busy with their own lives, whereas I remember feeling in the past as if everyone, myself included, was living in some kind of silent hysteria – there was a kind of tension in the air, everyone was in a state of perpetual expectation... I found this new sense of ordinariness, this quality of regularity of life in Yerevan comforting and reassuring, even though I knew that I was no longer a part of it…

***

I will be leaving Yerevan in a few hours. Leaving this time around is going to be harder than ever, mainly because the older I become, the more connected I feel with my immediate family, yet the further I grow geographically. I have also come to realize that my life as I know it – school, work, the person who I love – it’s all in the States, yet a big and an equally important part – my family - is here in Armenia, miles and miles away. What makes it even harder is knowing that my brother will be leaving in a month as well, to start graduate school in Europe and my little family will be scattered all over the world. As an older sister, I am, of course, worried. But I am even more worried about my mother. And I will miss them both, very dearly.

Leaving Yerevan has never been easy, but this time around it is even harder…