It's true, I've always loved airports and flying, but I think even I have a limit. Why all the chaos though? Why so much crazy effort?
It's for South Africa. If it wasn't the most beautiful and captivating place I've ever seen, I would've moved. I would've runaway. That is, as it seems, my mantra.
But not this time. I'm running back. My time in South Africa is nowhere near finished.
When I arrived in Europe I knew it wasn't the same. The flavor had changed - the way people move about, how they talk, the way they laugh. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Dutch or the French of course, but when they smile it doesn't warm my heart in the same way. It doesn't pull me to the earth the way Africa always has.
All of a sudden I am so very aware of the distance I require between myself and everyone else. Needing personal space is just a phrase that describes how uncomfortable you feel in your surroundings. It's part of white culture around the world, but that doesn't make it a valuable phenomena. Under observation, the concept is quite sad.
If I wanted space in Europe I wanted miles of breathing room when I finally reached the United States. I don't know if it can be called culture shock since I was returning to my supposed homeland, but what I felt was isolating and depressing. I've always hated Connecticut. I always knew I didn't belong there. But this time, just as the first and second times I returned from Africa, I was filled with the bitterness of knowing just where I did belong. Missing it.
I think perhaps I was always meant to run so far away. for as long as I can remember, I've always been waiting for the moment where I didn't want to run any more. I used to wonder if I was meant to be a nomad - if that was part of my native roots. I used to think I'd oscillate with the tides and the moon, change with the seasons, dictate my own cyclic migration. That I'd wander until the day my legs could no longer carry me, and then probably some more. I've always felt resigned to the notion that I won't ever stay long enough to belong.
My feet took me all over the world's oceans and across many continents from the Andes mountains in Chile to the Mekong delta in Cambodia and even to the chic European streets of London, Copenhagen and Stockholm, but nowhere did they stick to the ground quite like the first day I walked up table mountain.
I become a different person. In the states, I used to joke that I am not friendly, I avoid small talk and I have no patience for people. By joke, I mean I would say it while laughing, though it was inexorably, and quite obviously, the truth. I'm neither easy to talk to nor relatively interested in strangers. In Cape Town, I flourish.
I make lighthearted jokes with everyone. I share what I have. I laugh and smile all day with ease, and genuinely. How many Americans can say just that? I feel whole.
It helps too, that I've found someone to feel whole with, though I think he found me because of the way Africa illuminates me, not the other way around. We both seek nothing but to live happily, to help others, to bring the light we feel to people who are drowning in their own darkness. It's remarkable to have found someone a world away who is so similar to me.
In the same way that when I first met Mandy I knew we were of the same material, he and I are of the same basic elements, and for the first time in my life I don't just mean Carbon and Oxygen.
Recently I was asked how I surround myself with such amazing, good hearted people while others struggle to find true and honest friends. I could lie and say its just luck - and it would be much easier to explain than the feeling of being able to sense a person before they even know who they are. But, when I brush up against the lives of good people, something always lets me know.
Mandy and I once visited a psychic in New Orleans. It's something we do for fun in the cities we visit, just to hear the crazy and sometimes poignant things they have to say. At this particular shop, the reader informed us that we are both old, old souls, and when souls that old walk the earth they tend to cling to each other, travel in packs. They find one another in the masses, inexplicably they become bonded friends. As though the edges of their souls are frayed by the lives they've lived and their tendrils, their errant strands, reach out into the world, seeking others worn by time, grasping. When we meet its not words or countenance that draws us together so forcefully, it's the knitting together of our wisdom, the building of our patchwork. In some cases, the re-fabrication is the sewing of an old wound previously torn asunder. In others it's a new bond, a fateful meeting.
Perhaps that is what we are. Perhaps that's what I sense in the people I keep close to me.
My South African is worried that one day I will disappear, abandon him to the life he knew before he met me. I can't imagine turning back the clock, pretending we did not change each others lives, ignoring something my instinct says to grasp so tightly. I don't think he realizes I make these bonds with people for life.
Plus, I buried my old pair of nikes on the beach in Llandudno. It's a commitment to the dark continent that I will return.
Africa never really leaves you. And if you're smart, you'll never let her.
-Rh
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