But no worries, I made it back to the good ol' USA on the morning of August 9th.
...that moment when I finally stepped off the airplane onto the walkway, and all of a sudden it was real and I wasn't in Africa anymore. I put a little makeup on for the first time in a long time in the JFK airport bathroom by the baggage claim and wore jeans (jeans, real skinny jeans!), and I waltzed out of that airport and into New York City and ate a whole NY bagel with cream cheese (not low fat, the regular cream cheese please, sir, and thank you). I checked into a hostel with the cleanest, whitest sheets and took a shower with hot water, no bugs, and an unclogged drain. You're probably wondering why I'm talking about all these inane things, and I guess the truth is that I don't know why either.
People always ask me to tell them about Africa, and I never have the words.
I don't know what to say, so I say stupid, easy things. The things that people expect to hear. I mean, everybody wants to hear about how I went days without showering, right? That's gross and exciting.
And kind of completely irrelevant. Or I feel like it should be.
I've been looking at the white space that used to exist where this sentence is for a while now, and I realized it's because I don't know what to say next. I feel like I should talk about what was relevant from my experience. Africa seems to be a continent of superlatives, and I suppose so was my experience from the way I talk about it. Like Dickens put it,
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I had a lot of time in Africa to grow. Faith. Change. Risk. Faith. Patience. Love. Faith. Fear. Possibility. Frustration. Faith. Creativity and Growth and Fear and Vulnerability and Faith. I saw it everywhere and I read it everywhere and I talked it everywhere. I tried (am trying) to live it too.
I changed, but I changed the way I hope I would change regardless of where I get to go in the world. Maybe I just changed with time. Maybe Africa catalyzed that change and faith and me. Maybe it didn't. Regardless, it's a place that holds a thousand wonderful memories and three months of breaths and heartbeats.
Africa didn't change my life in the sense that I wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't gone. I am. I made a conscious decision to be who I was in Africa and I still make those choices today. But experiences don't need to turn your life 180 degrees to be worth it. They don't have to figuratively send you veering off a cliff, or mandate that you do a u-turn in the middle of the highway, or even suggest a turn onto that one forgotten road that nobody uses anymore. Sometimes, they can just be changing. And so you keep on driving on the same road you always planned to drive, and it just feels righter than ever, and maybe you even grow a few inches in the driver's seat. Not life-changing or anything. Just changing. It's good.
Somehow all of this feels internalized and solid in the depths of my chest.
But I don't have anything left to vocalize. I don't know what to say. So I look at you, and I say
Why yes, hot showers with water pressure are miraculous. It's great having cheese as its own food group again. I guess I don't wear a lot of makeup anymore. Khaki capris can be cute, right? Right? A little bit? No? Fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment