June 25, 2008

• 'Is' And 'Was'

  Wherever on the African continent I've touched down, when the plane door opens and conditioned European air dissipates in the cacophonous onrush of sub-Sahara, there's the overriding scent of laterite dust.  Traveling afoot or in open-air vehicles, it gets in your hair, suffuses your clothes, tinges your sweat.  It's ubiquitous and often unpleasant. 

  The day I left Africa for the last time, I mourned the loss of laterite.  I spent those hours breathing consciously of it; with every inhalation reliving another golden memory.  The good, the difficult, the dangerous, the revelatory -- all dust-wrapped and priceless.

  If, right now, I were suddenly transported back, there would be nothing there of that last day's supercharged emotion. Even if you mourn it often, and even if you return - you
  never have the totality of a place-and-people in quite the same way as you had it for the flash of time just
  before your departure.

  Is anticipative nostalgia so painful because it is so fleeting?

  I have a friend who's leaving a long-time home he loves, where he has roots and family, obligations and adulation, on all sides.  Every time he turns around, there's another farewell, another joking jibe belying teary eye, another lengthy embrace, another last look at a long-loved sight.  My friend's a world traveler with plenty of relocation in his past, but he didn't want to make this move right now.  There's an angry 'what-if' patina on all his nostalgia.  He sees the final good-bye streaking toward him at unstoppable
  speed.  He's sad, he's happy, he's angry, he's resolved, he's
  overwhelmed. 

  The thing about 'always having Paris' (as a metaphor for any  loss of great magnitude), is that you actually don't.  You only 'have Paris' in that fulgent instant just before you turn resolutely away from an abandoned dream:  the moment when you know, with all your soul, how precious it is; and, simultaneously, how integral to your being it was.

  Heartache.

  • 11:28 pm
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