"Never Hide"

"I've got a wall around me you can't even see / It took a little time to get to me"

-Paul Simon

Who forgets to bring sunglasses to Africa with them? Like, seriously?

This girl. Haha.

I have a sinking feeling that I left my Ray-bans sitting despondently somewhere in the house. My mom even insisted that I take them out of the car and into the house. "If you leave them in the car," she said a day or two ago, "you're going to forget them." She put them into my hand. I think I was on the phone, my mind a million miles away.

It is now Tuesday the tenth of February. Sunday went by in a flash of a short flight to Philadelphia, followed by a whirlwind of Peace Corps initiation, greetings, and paperwork. Went out for a sandwich and a cold beer with a large group of my fellow trainees, then slept maybe forty minutes before awaking for departure to JFK.

I regret to say I slept through most of my last exposure to my home state of New Jersey, as seen from the NJ turnpike as we sped along in the night towards NYC.

Long and thankfully uneventful flight to Johannesburg, where we are waiting for our connecting flight to Dar es Salaam.

Due to sleep deprivation I did not trust myself to continue this blog post until now, since I was able to get some sleep on the way here.

Ray-ban's slogan, "never hide", has been on mind since I was thinking about my missing sunglasses. The company promoted this concept, presumably meaning (based on my recollections of sepia-toned ads featuring beachy-haired Caucasians) that anyone, from celebrity to hung-over party animal to aloof hipster, can benefit from the air of indifference and detachment that wearing Ray-bans provides.

Maybe I internalized my sunglasses. Whether emotional detachment is an "innate" trait of mine or whether I've adopted it as a coping mechanism for various parts of my life is probably irrelevant. The point is that what I went a long time considering being my greatest strength is probably my greatest weakness. 

So maybe now, without my sunglasses, I will learn what it really means to never hide. Emotional attachment might not be easier than detachment, but maybe it will feel richer.

One of the last things our staging director said to us is that she hopes we fall in love with Tanzania, because when you are in love with something, you can let go of the little things. And there will be little things.

Tanzania, I'm coming for you - without my sunglasses and with my heart open a crack.

kx