March in review

love, loss, loneliness, Zucchini, the USSR, and Nike

March is green and light and simple but not easy. i love March. it’s totally in my top five favorite months. probably because i just really love SPRING!!!!!

anyway

1. Detroit is the first place I’ve ever felt lonely.

Detroit is the first place I’ve ever felt lonely. 

A delayed flight meant my 1 hour layover turned into a 13 hour one, so the airline offered me a meal and hotel voucher. And that should have been my adventurous urban-studies-major introverted dream: alone in a city I’ve never seen before. Thirteen hours to do whatever I want. 

But when the plane touches down in Detroit I just want to go somewhere that feels like home. I spent the last three days rarely out of reach from my Love, dancing through the town, eating at favorite restaurants… and it was a little easier to leave his arms when I believed I would be ending this day by getting into my dear friend’s car and falling asleep in a house full of people who love me, crawling into a bed where it doesn’t matter what time I woke up. 

Instead I’m alone in a city where I don’t know anyone. I use the meal voucher to get fake Chinese food at the airport, and it’s so awful that I feel sorry that I supported this business using the airline’s money. 

I dial the hotel front desk to ask about the airport shuttle and wonder if I still sound like a preteen boy on the phone. Does the cheery front desk woman believe that I’m old enough to be on my own in a city? Can she tell I’m just pretending to be an adult?

I know what some of you are thinking: but Amelia, you offer to call customer service for me. Why are you insecure about doing it for yourself? You arranged for a dozen people to fly to Europe last week, why are you suddenly acting like you don’t know how airports work? Your ideal day is one where the miles you run outnumber the people you talk to. Why would it be so hard to spend an evening alone? 

The truth is that I am just as confident and capable and independent as I seem—but shivering on the sidewalk, waiting for a shuttle in a city I’ll never see in the daylight, wondering how Detroit could be even colder than New York— was the first time I’ve ever actually been alone. I think we can imagine that go-getter free-spirited people have to be lone wolves, but that’s just not true. The difference between the wide-eyed adventurer and the heartbroken wanderer is that an adventurer has a home.

 

When I check in to the hotel, the woman I spoke to on the phone asks whether I want a king sized bed or two queens.

 “King!” I tell her, because that sounds like fun and I’m just one person anyway. 

But when I check out of the hotel at 3am for my 5am flight, that massive bed barely looks unmade. I only spent five hours in this room and at the end I just picked up my backpack and left.

As I ride back to the airport I think about how light a single life is. I’m nothing except a personal item and a take-out container of rice; I am fragile enough I can be plucked up and placed in some random city and told to survive. I’m just a bug floating on the surface of Detroit. The city didn’t even notice I was here.  

2. Grandpa’s war

At the end, Grandpa thought the assisted living facility was the barracks. 

“When do we ship out?” He asked. 

“I— I don’t know,” we had answered, truthfully. 

But now… Five soldiers firing three rounds. Salutes as the casket passes by. The oldest soldier playing taps. Shaky hands folding the flag into one more triangle for Dad to line up in the living room. 

Grandpa’s war is over, I think.

3. I-95

Growing up I wanted a romance with candlelight whispers and secrets in rose gardens and talking about philosophy in coffee shops and staying up late telling all our stories. My parents, and all their little conversations about rides to swim practice and what’s for dinner and who’s going to the grocery store, represented a life I was terrified I might someday settle for. 

And I do still want the first kind of love 

but yesterday my parents were talking about construction on I-95

and now that I’ve fallen in love too

I’m sitting in the back seat, thinking, I miss the person who would talk about the construction on I-95 with me. 

And suddenly I remember all those “do we need one copy of the paperwork or two?” And the “I already fed the cats twice today” and the “your car keys are in my purse” and now I see that there’s a million ways to say I love you I spent my whole life hearing but never understanding

4. Zucchini bread:

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures, but I really liked this peanut butter chocolate chip Zucchini bread! I made it for a friend’s murder mystery birthday party, and although I’d never baked Zucchini bread nor attended a murder mystery party before, both were wonderful new experiences!

(recipe available here from Sally's Baking Addiction)

5. Nike

my mom got me new sneakers and they look so clean and white and I’m obsessed!!!!! I somehow have a lot of Nike stuff now so I like wearing it all together and feeling like I’m a Nike ambassador

6. my new favorite book

I haven’t actually finished reading Sovietistan yet, but I knew it was my new favorite book before I finished reading the introduction. So I’m going slowly, savoring it, because it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever read and I know I can only have the delight of reading it for the first time once. 

Norwegian author and anthropologist Erika Fatland travels through the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. These countries—once the farthest reaches of the Soviet empire—are still completely unknown to Westerners. (Politically, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan are comparable to North Korea. Only one of the five countries has had a president step down of his own volition.)

Honestly I admire her stamina to travel all these distances— Central Asia stretches across 4 million miles of mountain and desert so she’s on week-long train rides and flights on airlines that are banned in European airspace. She endures long car rides to borders where her drivers slide cash to the officer and she lies that she’s just visiting as a student. I’m also blown away by her language abilities— she’s actually able to have conversations with people because even though she doesn’t know the dozens of languages spoken in this region she does know English, Russian, and German in addition to the Norwegian she originally wrote the book in.

Anyway—Fatland’s blend of historical research and personal experience within these countries creates an incredible sense of what these places are like and why. I didn’t just learn that Soviet officials attempted to reroute the Aral sea to irrigate a new cotton industry—I felt the salt and sand and wind left behind when the world’s fourth largest lake dried up. This book did an amazing job of tracing the shadow of the Soviet Union and giving faces to life in a land scarred by communist rule.

This is the type of writing I would really really really love to do someday!!!! I want to be Erika when I grow up