Hey There Delilah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJtYqBYCV8

The past few days I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head, and no idea where it was from. I went through a couple of my newer CDs today, trying to find it, but couldn't. Finally I googled the only phrase I remembered-- "two more years and you'll be done with school"-- and after finding and scrolling through the full lyrics, I remembered how I'd heard the song.

It'd been in Lima, driving back from a long day at a private school where we'd washed, scrubbed, and painted until we felt sick and light-headed from the gas-based paints and the turpentine they'd given us to get the stray green drops off the concrete floor. We were exhausted and, realizing we were still only halfway through the trip, it was hard not to long for home.

The phrase "a thousand miles away" resonated as we drove over dusty roads in a rickety old bus, looking through dirty windows at dirty dogs and a dirty gray sky that matched the flat land rising up to meet it in the distance. Children who would never be without lice waved and ran alongside the bus as we bounced by, thirty-six white kids in face paint and mime costumes whose hearts mourned with the acoustic guitar for the ones we'd left behind. Paul. Of course it'd hurt to say goodbye to him, but the feeling of unreality and excitement for the adventure ahead had temporarily softened the sense of loss, even as we counted the days I'd be in Peru.

Six days in the dust, speaking nothing but Spanish for eight hours out of every twenty-four, though, had burned through the illusion. I wanted home. I wanted trees and a real sky. The night before I'd left, Paul and I had walked the neighborhood until eleven, tilting our heads up often to admire the brightness of the stars. I'd marveled that in just a few days, I'd be seeing the same lights from an entirely different continent, with people I'd never met who spoke a language I'd only heard in school. Would I feel any different? Such romantic questions were a joke, I thought as the bus jostled on. There were no stars in Lima. I'd planned to walk outside each night to talk with them for a minute or two, whispering goodnight to Paul.

Ha. A few days into the trip I realized that my words would never reach the stars, that the clouds of dust hovering in the night sky had obscured their light for years, and weren't about to move now. Nothing here was the same, and it would be a long time before I'd see the moon again, especially from a square of clean sidewalk, surrounded by the strong, protective arms I loved so much.

"That song makes me miss my boyfriend," Noelle sniffed as we stumbled off the bus and started for our cabin, still dizzy and half-painted. "You too?"

"Yeah, I miss him." Dang, I missed him.

"Hey there Paul Miller, what's it like back where I come from? You're a thousand miles away but boy tonight you look so handsome, yes you do...."