....the last post.
- the month of May. Delhi, India. Sweltering heat, powercut, work, water shortage, visitors, shooing lizards in the kitchen. Blanking out - Showing someone the map of our US trip itinerary, I forgot the name of the place in Arizona which has the vortexes. It came back just now - Sedona.
Sitting here, in this world which is so far away from the one I visited, I wonder how something that still feels so fresh in my heart and my inner eye, is receding from my mind in this way. And as I write, I understand that this is happening in a process of taking distance from the excitement that I had been immersed in as I relived moments, memories, visuals and vistas, laughter and faces of The Trip each time I talked about it. For until this happened I could not write or think - really think about the trip. I needed this time to assimilate the 4 months that I spent in America in such a fantastic way.
I think today I have breathed enough and taken in enough to be able to write here. Everything here is about the trip, except that now it is coming in a chewed and enzymed form - mixed with the juices of my system that has been digesting America inside me all these months.
Today, I can write with ease about the drive through the snow storm from Stamford, Connecticut to Cincinnati, Ohio. At that time I was in it - The person who was in that drive, focusing on the road, aware of the danger, enjoying the flurries, enjoying the thrill of it all, the adventure of driving for the first time in a snow storm through landscape that had been hidden and silenced by the same snow again and again - that person was not the same one who is sitting here, in Delhi, with the computer on her lap and ice melting in the freezer, in the mode of writing about that drive. This Writer Self and That Driver Self are ready to meet.
And that my friends is an introduction to what is to come. I am going to email Carol and ask her to invite all her America Trip Selves and if she is game will party here in this blog and exchange stories and invite you all to join us.
With Love,
Komal
