Niswarth: Departure
Friday, June 17, 2016
This trip, steeped and stinking already with the desire to escape and renew, takes me by surprise. It is being Presented to me, using the word presented most literally, as in handed to me like a gift. An opportunity yearned for so often by others, unabashedly: a clean slate. Even an encouraging nod towards leaving behind the me that existed before going on this trip. And it screams an assumption that before, say, the relentless humdrum of Andover took over my life, I was less lost; there is some sort of stained, morphed, self that was more admirable in its purest state. This shakes me, I was unaware of how sure I am that No not now, but at some point I was truly good. These are the moments when the word ‘faith’ gains shape and hue in my mind.
It strikes me as comical, to find aspects about this trip so comforting already. Daniel is writing with Lucida Handwriting, after I bulwarked him from his third Disney movie. Shyan showed up with a fanny pack, and it’s pleasing that I don’t know him yet so I’m not sure if it’s worn ironically or not. There are lights, I wonder if anyone else lingered on them, on the ceiling of the aisles on the plane, dots of stars when the cabin goes dark. I’m going to India, stopping at Dubai, where Julia will meet us from her first time with her mother in Korea, something groundbreaking and momentous for her that I already feel I have missed by not having been there with her. Which leaves me to my worries. Silly, to start the trip with worries but here it is: How can I make this journey inclusive when I return. I loathe the idea of the line running through my mind, you had to be there.
This trip is not about school, but the first two weeks of summer were. And it incapacitates me to doubt my own intentions: Maybe my true worry is about being unable to impart wisdom into an essay for an application to a university. I feel a fear that will not rise rapidly and panic my body but rather flood and sweep away homes for hopes dismissed, not forgotten. These homes are not seated deep in my heart but are already shy and small and wedged in the crooks of my elbows and in between my toes. I can’t help but wonder if my mind is so stuck in this inscrutable negativity, stuck in myself, that I have to choreograph optimism into my journals intentionally, so as not to depress faculty who chose to bring me, bless their souls.
Truth is one of those words that makes me shift in my seat and feel my sock rubbing against my right big toe where I cut my nail just a little bit too far back this morning. I hope I can leave behind this feeling.
--Camilla