For the last three days, I’ve slept in a bed (incidentally a step up from the floor that I’ve been using for the last four months) and when I wake up, I shower and then have coffee made in a kitchen with a fridge where I pull out some Gaia apples from New Zealand. I choose those over the California varietals. It just wouldn’t have seemed right.
I’ve gone into town and been able to buy generally whatever I want. There is a grocery store two blocks away. Walking to town, I pass a Porsche dealership, an auto-supply store, and a Fed Ex. I know where the ACE hardware store is. The drum of traffic is ever present as cars race by, and the hint of pollution hangs in the air. The air overhead buzzes with planes.
The TV is on in front of me. It’s a flat screen. The computer next to it is constantly hooked up to the internet and so I have non-stop access to email.
This morning, I watched World Cup soccer in a restaurant while drinking a European style coffee with a thoroughly American style Starbucks price. I played poker until 1 am two nights ago. I lost. Badly.
Some things, it seems, never change no matter where you are in the world.
I am not however, in Denver despite how similar all of the above experience might seem to the humdrum of my previous life. I am in Papeete, Tahiti.
Tahiti is geographically almost as far from Denver as possible. Likewise, my life now is nearly as far away as can be imagined from about a year ago. The last year has been an incredible roller coaster. I have been assailed with many difficult situations, happiness, depression, intense disappointment, renewed appreciation, lost relationships, and much to my delight a resurrection of another one I had long thought dormant or gone. Like a roller coaster ride pulling back into the station, My life has come full circle and I am once again about to join this sailing adventure we started planning now five years ago. Six months, a year, two years, forever…. My mom I’m sure does not want to hear the latter, and to assuage her trepidation, I can’t imagine it either.
The year long roller coaster ride, however, had its affect, its ride while intense, has been emotionally exhausting, taxing. Lately I have become nearly singularly focused on the transition from one ride to another, from one chapter of my life to another. I’ve spaced out in conversations with friends, lost in reflection on the past year, and truthfully in moderate disbelief of what the next year might hold. I am fond of saying right now that I am as happy as I have ever been, and what I have rediscovered in the last month has contributed to fairly well cementing that to be true.
I have not emerged unaffected, however from the year long roller coaster ride. I told my dad I no longer have the feeling of unencumbered happiness. He liked that phrase. It is something between guilt, which is a terrible word to describe it, and quiet reflective pensiveness and appreciation of how my reality has settled and I have thus landed in Tahiti. When you look at a baby or young child you can see that unencumbered happiness. Bliss. Now my happiness, while great, is more quiet, silently acknowledging that much happened which was out of my control to bring my here. I suppose I am trying to respect that for the first time in my life, true sadness played a role in my being where I am in life, and that deserves acknowledgment from me.
After three days in Papeete, today I begin to travel to Fakarava. In the Tuomotu’s internet connection is effectively non-existent, and so I am jealous of boats like Io who are able to update their blogs from their boat. Trust that I am writing frequently and prolifically, but updates may be slow in coming until we return to Tahiti, about a month from now I believe. Now I must go catch a cargo ship!