The Blog.

I-76, the most reflective highway in America.

After spending two and a half weeks in Western PA on a whim I am about to head back east and spend a week preparing to go to east Africa for the semester. It’s important for me to revisit the places and people I have left behind and be forcibly reminded that they still live their lives outside of my often narrowly solipsist perceptions. They don’t just cease to exist when I cease to be around. Fancy that. People have changed. Places feel different. I am reminded I don’t belong, but I am always welcome; an interesting and satisfying contrast.

On top of that, I will finally have a chance to “go back” to Philadelphia and eventually to Eastern. I have a theory that you can’t call a place home until you have “gone back” to it. It seems fitting that I will finally feel as though I can go back to something after being new for a year. There will be fresher faces than mine. There will be unfamiliar things, but I might know the ropes a little better than some.

Such is college: moving upwards of 3 times a year, a barrage of intense relationships that make up for their brevity by their depth, appreciating all the wrong things and taking the right things for granted, and end it all with one of the most stomach-knotting senses of vertigo imaginable: graduation. I can hear the waters at the bottom of the cataracts, but it’s still smooth sailing for me. And yet I can’t think of a better way to end it: a semester of climax in Africa, followed by just enough time for a solid denouement to close the hero quest. Thank you Mrs. Pohlner, 12th grade English teacher.

So many thoughts about the coming semester abroad and so few that are coherent. I stand by my decision to suspend my expectations, take it as it comes, and debrief on the way home. What else can I do? No use projecting my assumptions onto a continent about which I literally know nothing. Vaguely racist as this phrase might be, “darkest Africa” has never seemed darker. I’m dreading the 20 or so hours of flying more, however.

It’s coffee time. Tazza D’oro is almost reason enough to come back to Pittsburgh.

Peace.