Returning home was waking from the dream. I had that feeling the whole plane ride home- where the reality of the waking world taps lightly at the periphery of your dream. Every familiar accent, every Starbucks cup, every hushed echo of the words "San Francisco" coursing through the plane reminded me of the life I had forgotten. When we finally landed and I was joyously reunited with my exuberant family, it was just the same as struggling to keep your eyes open after you first wake up. I forced myself to remember, Oh yes! The sky is soft and grey in San Francisco. This is winter; the air is crisp. This is the car and I sit on this side when I'm not driving and we drive on that side of the road. I had to explain it to myself in order to understand. It was similarly surreal walking into our house, smelling and hearing all those details I had missed for almost a whole year. As disruptive, consuming, and ineffective as our furnace is, I love its unique din.
As time passed, I slowly eased back into my former life like easing into a hot bath. At first, I just wanted to tell stories, show pictures, and pass around trinkets. My family had work and school, though, so I spent some time resting and thinking.
Walking into the grocery store was an ordeal. Every time I went shopping, I was curiously reminded of the comforts of home that I had lived without, somehow. Simultaneously, I was crestfallen to search for the products I had become accustomed to and not find them. Even still! I wake up craving Ouma Rusks, some custard for my peaches, gem squashies, tennis biscuits, or a granadilla. Sigh.
 |
| If you've never had one of these, you have no idea what you're missing. |
After about a week of being home, it already felt like the past ten months had been a dream, a hair-pin loop, a detour from the course of my previously scheduled life. It was so easy to file the entire experience away and focus on living in the present. Once the hymnopompic gauze fades and you decide to really get up and actually keep your eyes open, the rest of your body adjusts, right? I focused on finishing up my degree, on family, on my friendships, and on my neglected relationship.
Once you are immersed in a dream, as confused and nonsensical as it may be, you roll with it. You can hardly do otherwise. Moving to South Africa was a serious departure from from my waking consciousness and the body of information that was my understanding of the world. Like the foreignness of a strange dream, I had to be open minded, flexible, and also careful of my new world. Being back in the warm swaddle of familiarity, I am back in my element, come full circle to the place where I started.
And yet.
And yet, everyday I am back in South Africa. I hear a bird call and think, wait, was that a goose or a hadeda? I see plants whose names I did not know before but that I now recognize as South African natives. I think, the sun feels strange today; has it always been so weak? I hear a song that came out last year and I am transported to the minbus where I heard it for the first time. I see a movie poster and think of the fabulous date on which I saw it. Every time someone talks about the operating system Ubuntu, I am caught off-guard.
 |
| How could it not be dream, with this terrible monster roaming the streets? |
I am restored to familiarity. I am not back in my context, however, because my context has been forever altered by what I learned when I lived abroad.
No comments:
Post a Comment