" Baba!! Your phone has been off for hours, I've tried to reach you several times...are you trying to give me a heart attack!!? You will hear it from me when you turn it on..."
A message from Chika to me, November 2013, on my way back to camp.
So, here's a cool new word - Resfeber
Resfeber - Noun, origin Swedish; Definition – the restless race of the traveller's heart before the journey begins, when anxiety and anticipation are tangled together.
I sat on the bus filled with all manner of Resfeber as I thought about the past few days. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to like someone without holding anything back – giving in utterly to how I felt at every point. A flurry of thoughts burst through my head as the bus made its way out of Lagos – I felt a weird assortment of things; I was...
Happy that I spent time with Jay,
Sad and scared that I might not see her again till God knows when
Anxious to get the journey over with and get back into camp
Worried that I might run into some trouble getting back in.
Pissed (slightly) that my mom gave me grief about running late, even though she was completely in the right to do so.
I can't remember which the prevalent feeling was – all I know is that I wanted my mind to stop pulling me in so many directions; I needed to feel one way and one way only – Oh I forgot to add 'silly' to that list, for not charging my phone and being forced to switch it off for the entire journey so I'd have some battery left when I got back to camp; all that time with Jay and the hurrying around that followed left me with no time to charge my phone and I didn't have a power bank with me...
...hence the message at the beginning of this chapter
After a while, my thoughts and feelings got untangled and I was able to dwell on the good stuff – I felt really proud of what I'd done to see Jay.
I've done a few things in my lifetime that made me really happy and proud of myself – one is back when my family and I lived in Moscow and we had just moved to a new apartment, we ran into this woman in the park opposite our building who was undertaking this task of raking leaves to clear the park and make it more 'usable'; my siblings and I decided to help her and we did a great job of cleaning the place – she was super thankful and told us that she knows a few guys at the local newspaper office and she's going to tell them about how we helped her and get our faces in the paper – black people in a local Russian newspaper? That's a huge deal, especially in post-communist Russia. She kept her word and our faces were in the paper – needless to say we kept a copy of that paper as a reminder of the good work we did and how far she went to thank us; Spasibo zhyensheena (thanks lady) ;-)...
...but the feeling of leaving camp to see Jay tops all the others.
Jay once said to me
"I can't believe you left camp just to see me Cyrus, you rock more than a TA ring!"
I think she meant it, or maybe I just wanted to believe it and bask in it; one other time she told me about how her friend kept asking her why she really liked me, she said "All those other guys do easy things and claim that they're over the moon for me...Cyrus did something hard; he risked a lot just to see me...".
I did, risk a lot – but there was still the part of getting back to camp which would make it complete.
Plan-ten
