Giving this a try
So really this was going to be merely a front for my not-so-secret obsession with fanfiction. However, as I am leaving Ghana in 17 days and this is sort of the end of an era, why not write about it? So here goes.
I spent the last year studying abroad in Ghana, having the most amazing, frustrating, incredible, difficult year of my life, and it is almost over. The friends I have made here really kept me afloat during rocky patches. Blah blah blah, like everyone else who has spent time enough in a foreign land to make a family. The thing is, I dont really know how to say goodbye. How do I let it go? It will be over regardless, because everyone is moving off campus now, going their separate ways. And my mom is coming to spend two weeks 'seeing Ghana' before we leave. The part I am most looking forward to? The middle of the plane ride from Accra to Frankfurt, when everyone else is asleep and I cant see the desert below me but I know its there, rolling by me while I stand still thousands of feet about the ground. When I can lean my head against the window and just let it all go. I dont think I will be able to do that until I am so detached from it all, so far above and ahead of everything I am living in the middle of right now. And then it will probably hit me that no one at 'home' knows what a trotro is or what plantain chips are supposed to cost, and I will sit there with my face pressed to the cold window and wish for something that is over.
Is there such a thing as reverse nostalgia, where you have feelings of longing for something you havent done yet? or is that just the dark, twisty cousin of anticipation?
I spent the last year studying abroad in Ghana, having the most amazing, frustrating, incredible, difficult year of my life, and it is almost over. The friends I have made here really kept me afloat during rocky patches. Blah blah blah, like everyone else who has spent time enough in a foreign land to make a family. The thing is, I dont really know how to say goodbye. How do I let it go? It will be over regardless, because everyone is moving off campus now, going their separate ways. And my mom is coming to spend two weeks 'seeing Ghana' before we leave. The part I am most looking forward to? The middle of the plane ride from Accra to Frankfurt, when everyone else is asleep and I cant see the desert below me but I know its there, rolling by me while I stand still thousands of feet about the ground. When I can lean my head against the window and just let it all go. I dont think I will be able to do that until I am so detached from it all, so far above and ahead of everything I am living in the middle of right now. And then it will probably hit me that no one at 'home' knows what a trotro is or what plantain chips are supposed to cost, and I will sit there with my face pressed to the cold window and wish for something that is over.
Is there such a thing as reverse nostalgia, where you have feelings of longing for something you havent done yet? or is that just the dark, twisty cousin of anticipation?