Thursday, March 22, 2012

Looking Back

I have been digging around in my photo library, trying to find photos to populate an album of "Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik" images.

Browsing through old photos makes me wistful, or sometimes sentimental. I usually find myself hurrying past certain images that remind me of unpleasant times, but today I didn't rush. I looked at photos of past heartbreaks with a kind of dull curiousness. That's me? And that German guy there is the one that abandoned me fresh out of a Namibian hospital, and hid in the Ugandan forest for months without contact?

He looks...eh. He holds no power over me.

So I'm stronger, not bothered anymore by old news. That's not because of time—time doesn't really heal wounds. Rather, it helps you learn to live with them.

I had a hard knock again over the last few weeks. But this time, I seem to be springing back way faster, and seizing the opportunity to ground myself in ways I should have done the second I returned home. I let myself be railroaded into a situation way too quickly, in part because I was dealing with an unstoppable force of nature, in part because I was too wishy-washy to get my point across firmly, having just landed on America's soil after months of roaming.

It might take me a while to look at the most recent photos—I'm not so tough that I have forgotten that quickly.

But I can look at the old ones, of the man and his Yamaha Tenere that I met on the way out of Sudan that I later thought of as the lamest-man-in-the-world, and I can enjoy them now.

He's not in this one. Someone had to take the photo. But what on earth was I doing? Amusing my future self, no doubt.

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