We sat across the table from each other, across a world from the little pizza place in Lalibela, Ethiopia where she and her two friends were sitting when I walked in. I met them by accident. I would have chosen a table and sat alone, but the server took one look at me and motioned around the corner to their table. "Here are the people who match you," she seemed to be saying., although we didn't share a language. "Sit with them."
So I sat with them, and we ate pizza, and found that we had, as usual, only two degrees of separation. I knew someone who knew one of them. N.'s family took me in when I got back to Addis Ababa, and I slept in a narrow little bed in a tiled house full of an expatriate family and the friends they've picked up and invited in. It was so familiar, even in a whole new country, that I felt a physical ache in my stomach and my chest from my desire to stay in Africa. L. and N. and I stayed up late one night, talking about everything in the world: politics and religion and love and travel.
Fourteen months and three continents later, I dropped everything to meet N. for coffee on a few hours notice. We sat in this coffeeshop, here, in my boring new life. We talked the way global nomads talk, with all the immediate intensity you can share when you have an unusual shared experience. We talked about why we left, and what we miss, and what we don't.
"You need people here who you can talk to about these things," she told me. "You have to find some friends who understand when you talk about not making eye contact, or about never being anonymous. Otherwise, you start to feel like you are crazy."
She's right. I do.
So I sat with them, and we ate pizza, and found that we had, as usual, only two degrees of separation. I knew someone who knew one of them. N.'s family took me in when I got back to Addis Ababa, and I slept in a narrow little bed in a tiled house full of an expatriate family and the friends they've picked up and invited in. It was so familiar, even in a whole new country, that I felt a physical ache in my stomach and my chest from my desire to stay in Africa. L. and N. and I stayed up late one night, talking about everything in the world: politics and religion and love and travel.
Fourteen months and three continents later, I dropped everything to meet N. for coffee on a few hours notice. We sat in this coffeeshop, here, in my boring new life. We talked the way global nomads talk, with all the immediate intensity you can share when you have an unusual shared experience. We talked about why we left, and what we miss, and what we don't.
"You need people here who you can talk to about these things," she told me. "You have to find some friends who understand when you talk about not making eye contact, or about never being anonymous. Otherwise, you start to feel like you are crazy."
She's right. I do.
1 comment:
me too.
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