A Dream Fulfilled

“Welcome to Hollywood! Everybody comes to Hollywood got a dream. What’s yo dream? What’s yo dream? …Hey, Mister! What’s yo dream?!...” - opening lines from the film Pretty Woman

My dream has been fulfilled, and it’s more eerily perfect than anything Hollywood could muster. My dream was of home. That’s right, I’ve come home! I have a whole 14 days of vacation right here in the great, whirlwind metropolis of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Best place in the world, if you as me… though there’s no guarantee that I’m not bias.

2 WEEKS HOME!!!

I know you all might be a little surprised, because I hadn’t written anything about coming home this summer… well, I’m surprised too. Actually, lets take a moment and all be surprised together.

Moment

…done yet? Okay, I’ll explain. So, there I am, sitting in Boukombe a few weeks ago moping around from boredom. This wasn’t your average case of boredom though. The people I usually visit in village weren’t around and one of them actually moved, the rain was so relentless that you really couldn’t go on a long walk, there was nothing good or interesting to eat, and the worst part – EVERYONE AROUND ME WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH WAS GONE, and they would be till September!!!!
I call this boredom, but it’s a whole separate species of boredom. This is the worse kind of boredom. It’s the ‘neverending boredom’, it’s the ‘mac-daddy of boredom’ boredom. It’s the “You go to get away from the boredom only to become more bored, but just in another place” boredom. If this boredom were in Star Wars, it would have “The Force”. If the picture isn’t clear enough, here’s my last analogy: This boredom is the iceburg to any human-beings Titanic.

Layman’s terms: I was going crazy!!!

On top of all this, It costs me the equivalent of $10USD to make a 20 minute phone call to home… this is 2 and a half days of pay for me for a 20 minute conversation. In times of utterly painful boredom, this sacrifice must be made.

Anyway, in one of these impoverishing phone calls to home, I mention to my mother that I would just like to get away. 2 days later I had a plane ticket. Luckily, Mom had all these sky miles that were going to get used for a friend, but then that friend decided not to use them, so I got them! They paid for the WHOLE ticket too. If you believe in destiny you could even say it was meant to be, because just about every seat I got was the last one available! Well, then a little bit more miserable boredom time passed, and then I was on a plane, and then I was here!

It’s weird to think that I was just in Africa. It’s really weird. I keep crying at everything. In the airport in Detroit, my first landing in the USA in 1 year and 1 month, I ran to my next connection out of sheer excitement. I also got a bagel and cream cheese, and I spent a few minutes smelling, yes, smelling the bagel before finding the nerve to brake it’s beautiful surface. Then the tears welled up. The girl in the corner smelling and crying to a bagel must appear crazy to others.

Then I sniffled myself to sleep on the last leg to OKC. I wasn’t bawling or anything. It wasn’t even a cry really… it was the same as the tears caused by cutting an onion. Also, they weren’t sad tears, but they weren’t happy either. It was a cry from shock. I didn’t know how to handle it all. Then we started coming in to town, and all the lights started to pop out of the sea of black, and then I was overwhelmed even more… who could afford to leave that many lights on!!!

Upon landing I very selfishly pushed my way to the front of the crowd – screw ‘em – And ran to my parents and best friends Pam and Andy who were there to meet me. A hug has never felt so good.

And then we spoke some English together… and that has been a constant since stepping off that plane.

The tears didn’t stop there though. The car, the house, the red velvet cake Pam made me, the carpet everywhere, the internet, the pretty computer, the conversations, the old couch I used to always sleep on, the old brown chair I grew up in, the toilet with a constant flow of water, the soft toilet paper, the Dr. Pepper, the paved roads everywhere, the cars everywhere with only one person in them, driving, the glass everywhere, my reflection in a huge mirror, my old teddy bear, pretty furniture, cereal at the breakfast table in the morning, a Chinese buffet of endless sanitary food that tastes good, beds and pillows that are soft and not permanently imprinted with my body, that precious hot shower, the make-uped feeling of being ‘maintained’, curled hair, that never-ending electricity, the pool outside, the flowers, the grass, the radio with new songs in English… you name it, I’ve cried for it. In fact, I’ve started crying again just mentioning everything.

The first night was a sleep that replenished my adrenaline, but I can’t say it did much else. So, the second night I crashed. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to find that I had crashed in my parents bed while we had been talking the night before, and they had kindly just slept around me. I felt like that little girl who crawled into mommy and daddy’s bed after an intense dream… and maybe I am. That dream over there definitely is intense. I don’t want it to be related to a nightmare… it is nothing of the sort!!! It’s a whole other world though. A completely different world altogether.

It’s now 6:30am of that same morning, and I found myself at a loss of words. This whirlwind vacation is spinning away like grains of sand in a time glass, and I feel them falling. I know this time is going to fly by, and then this will be the dream in that other reality again.

What a strange, strange world.