Talking to D. is an exercise in Blowing My Mind sometimes. He’s all “So stella bella, tell me what you’ve done today!” and I’ll be all “Oh nothing much: went to the farmer’s market, bought some organic pluots. You?” and then he’s like “Oh, well, I took a helicopter to meet with the UN officials and then there was a security alarm and then it was time for curfew, so you know. A pretty ordinary day,” and then my head explodes.

He’s in Darfur, you see. On purpose! He’s there for six months working on the administration of an Italian humanitarian organization there, and you should see the pictures he sends me, man. He tells me about the camps, about the foreigners from all over the world working there, about learning Arabic, about how he’s sorry he was late emailing me but the satellite internet wasn’t working. He tells me about the desert, how no one who hasn’t seen it can really understand what it’s like; how it takes a Land Rover a week to get from one of the camps to the outskirts of the nearest city, 30 kilometers away, and that’s in the dry season, how it takes a month in the wet season. He tells me that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to eat camel the other day.

And I am so so so so so so so jealous. He’s getting paid to be in this amazing place with amazing people doing really interesting work and every time we talk I imagine what it would be like to be there with him. He says that he spends a lot of time in meetings and messing around with spreadsheets, that it’s mostly fairly mundane but necessary but in my head, of course, it’s all romance and danger and Indiana Jones all the time. Today he told me about a couple there who met in Afghanistan and just got married back in Italy, how she’s the project manager and he’s the water sanitation engineer and I promised him that I too would become a water sanitation engineer if that’s what it would take to let me get out there and see what it’s like.

And in the meantime I’m staying this week in a lovely apartment on Queen Anne, walking my friend’s miniature huskies down to Trader Joe’s, drinking tea and eating yogurt and meeting friends for brunch, going through my papers and selling my books and my food processor and my paper shredder and my side table and everything else. I’m drinking a lot of pomegranite smoothies and eating a lot of salad with marinated tofu and red peppers and emailing and Facebooking and texting a lot. I’m getting ready to go back to Miami in September to spend some more time with my mom while I continue to work on getting a job and a visa and residency in New Zealand. Except for my being unemployed, still, I’m having a very nice easy uncomplicated middle-class life.

And I go back and forth, back and forth, wanting to just pack up my green pack and travel the world forever (water sanitation!) and to never have a permanent address ever again but a lot of extra pages in my passport instead, while simultaneously thinking about how I’d like to decorate my imaginary apartment in Wellington that I don’t have and about how I’d really like to get a pair of nice knee-high boots and what I’d like to put on a Netflix queue, if I were staying anywhere long enough to receive all the episodes in a series. I want to own nothing more than I can carry, I want to speak every dialect of every language in the world. I want to buy some cute sheets on sale and go out for work drinks if you’re free this Friday.

“Travelling,” D. IM’d me this morning–he had to go soon, he had to shut off the generator (babur in Arabic) and go to bed–”is a form of escape from the real world,” meaning commutes and mortgages and Thanksgiving dinner and jobs in cubicles. We went back and forth on that for a while; he says that he can’t believe that Darfur and his lake and the Olympics are all on the same planet. I say that all the worlds we live in are equally real but they rarely overlap. How do you compare a roadless desert to your 45 minutes in traffic on the 520 bridge this morning? How do you think about the farmer’s market and the refugee camps with the same brain? How can you both want to snuggle on the couch watching a movie and drinking tea with your partner and want to swing into the helicopter next to him, stride out across the red sand in broken-in boots?

They’re all true, they’re all real, they all co-exist, but how?. And how can we choose; what kinds of choices are we even capable of making?

Posted on August 17th, 2008 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything