Settling In

It’s been my misfortune to crisscross the country several times with some cat or other in tow.  On one occasion, as cries and drool spattered us from the backseat, my co-driver tried to reassure me that since cats don’t really have much short term memory it shouldn’t take long before our furry hostage forgot all about her life outside the moving car and consequently calm down to her new reality.  Alas, the cat ignored that quite reasonable theory and managed to spend the entire trip to Alabama in hysterics, but I’ve thought of my friend’s theory many times since.

It’s not like, after a week and a half, Addis is the only life I’ve ever known.  It’s just that other lives are starting to feel a bit insubstantial in comparison.  Bouncing against the window of an antique Toyota minibus, I find it hard to believe that there are places as clean as I remember, where concrete smooths over the earth in unbroken slabs, always beginning and ending where it’s expected.  Haven’t I always lived someplace where driving in the middle of the road is the default and all right of ways are a matter of vehicular negotiation?

Ethiopia still has plenty of shocks and strangeness, it’s just that I’ve gotten used to being shocked.  It will be nice to get back to a world where I don’t have to steel myself every time I walk out the door — against begging children, against amorous young men, against crushing poverty, against disfiguring disease — but that squaring of the shoulders is starting to feel like second nature.

Wow, just trying to picture my morning dog-walks at home, where the only human interactions are a few nods and hellos, feels dreamlike right now.  You’re just never alone here.

It’s hard for the brain to believe the world contains so much variety, and that for the price of a few hours suspended in the air, one can partake of so much of it.  Easier just to accept that this jolting, confining place is my world now and not worry too much about the befores and afters.

 

Advertisement