Settled in for a longish haul

Back in NYC x 2 weeks, I'm feeling pretty at home.

Flashing back to two weeks ago, when I started to write and then got distracted (blame the city that never sleep), I wrote the following:

Aug 21stish, 2014

It was a treat to key into my apartment Tuesday morning; my studio felt warm and bright and there was something about the textures and soft wood finishes that halted me. I don't know why I didn't have as strong of a reaction first arriving at my parent's home in New Jersey; maybe because that's a house house and was so at odds with my living arrangements in Malawi my brain didn't even attempt registration of a comparison. Maybe it's because while in Malawi I frequently made mental and aloud comparisons to my apartment and not to my parent's home. Who knows/cares. The point is that whatever the reason, it shocked me, culturally, to return to the familiar. The familiar being N-Y-C. 

I really do love New York. So much so, I'm flirting with a Back in New York City blog, though perhaps I should stop with these bizarrely specific and temporally- inclined blog names and find a broader address at which to pen my conscious. We'll see. For now I'll stick tight here. 

Because Malawi is still at the tip of the tongue. My friends have impressed me with their curiosity and delighted me with their enthusiasm in my trip.  Their questions have been so top notch I feel like hanging out with them can kind of fall under the category of 'Prepare for residency interviews/life'. They're allowing me to relive my summer and to discover even more about my experience, which I know may be somewhat hard to believe considering I've now shared some 40 insights.

We've had a handful of conversations about the effect my summer in Malawi has had on me; the impression it has made; the changed woman I may or may not have become.  I'm flattering myself by repeating that I'm not that kind of girl- the type that comes home from a summer in the developing world and suddenly shuns creature comforts. For one, I'd like to think I've never been that frivilous but what's more I'd like to think I'm not that naive...

...and then it appears I stopped. The phone must've rang or maybe the doorbell or maybe the sun screeching through my 24th story window won me over and I ditched my MacBook screen and my plush new throw pillows and headed for the streets.  I'll complete the above thought, though, and say that I'm not so naive in the following way: the hardships and poverty I witnessed in Malawi existed before I got there, and exist now that I left.  At this precise moment in time thousands and thousands of miles away children are sleeping under thatched roofs and mosquito nets; women are feeling the first cramps of labor and fearing the distance they must all the sudden travel to the hospital; drug shortages and food shortages and gas shortages are blossoming.  Just because you haven't seen something doesn't mean it doesn't exist and just because you're no longer staring something in the face doesn't mean it isn't still unfolding, right before someone else's eyes.  For these reasons I'm not going to feign transformation but instead am going to hold on tight to the memories and reality of what was my reality for those two unbelievably special months. I feel like what I'm trying to get at is saying I'm changed makes it seem like I all the sudden had some sort of epiphany, which isn't what happened.  Instead I was so lucky to be exposed to a world that up until then had been beyond my fingertips.  And now I've reached this world. I haven't changed, I'm just standing on my tippy toes.

I'll write again and try to make more sense..

Happy Labor Day,

R