Sylvia's Journal

I am home again. After a delicious dinner with all the raw veggies I had done without for the last 10 day, prepared by Steve and Tessa, I collapsed into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night I woke up to see a full moon lighting up Lobster Cove, which is beautiful in any condition. I am very grateful to be home again.

My first sleep home ended with an intense dream about a small plane crash. Before it crashed it had been hovering low over the ground next to an embankment. The pilot, a woman, stuck her head out of the window and confirmed a date and a time I would go up with her. I had met her before. I considered for a moment hopping onto the plane right there and then, that is how low it was to the ground; but I was heading someplace else and decided to wait until Friday, the day and time we had agreed on. The plane then banked to fly away. It hit something with its wingtip and crashed onto the embankment and fell into the water. For awhile no one did anything and then people began to jump into the water. I stood too high to jump and felt powerless as I watched the passengers trying to get out. Then the image of the dream changed and I was sitting next to the damaged plane trying to keep the two hurt people inside from drifting away. I discovered there were children on board, one infant among them. They were fine but stunned. I read children’s rhymes to them while keeping an eye on the parents (I supposed) who were in bad shape. Someone had called 911 and I was impatient for someone to take over who could really help. I woke up before help arrived.

The dream was so intense and so real that there was no risk of losing it, some details maybe but not the essential story. I contained elements from our crash (badly hurt, staying awake, parents, children) but had me in an outsider’s role, experiencing a tiny bid of the agony that our rescuers had experienced. In real life the story had a good ending, which is not obvious in the dream. Somewhere, in my unconscious, there is still a filing cabinet filled with crash-related stuff, within easy reach.

The journey home from Abidjan to Paris and then from Paris to Boston was endless; seemingly more endless than many of the much longer flights I have taken earlier this year, to and from Afghanistan and Tanzania. I did not sleep at all on any of the four legs, going out and coming back. On the last stretch home I felt like an overtired child that cannot get comfortable and relax enough to get back to sleep. The size of everything on the AF planes, seat, tray table, leg room, toilets, seemed smaller than I remember. I did fly another company (AF instead of NWA/KLM) so it may actually be true. The general discomfort was exacerbated by hot flashes that come on about every 20 minutes or so; on an 8 hour flight that makes for many uncomfortable, dare I say, inconvenient, personal climate changes.

During the last interminable 30 minutes of our descent into Boston I practiced what is suggested by a favorite quote: if you are patient you can wait much faster. Although uncomfortable, I remained very patient, having waited in that tight space for so long at that point, I was able to handle the additional 30 minutes (we made a 360 turn on our way down) like a saint. And then, when we landed, the delight to put away this small furry thing that is my fear that this flight will not end well. After my frightful experience flying out of Kabul, this fear has been a little bit more present than it used to be before.It is always there and pops into my consciousness from time to time although most of the journey I manage to keep it under wraps.

The patient waiting, during the entire flight from beginning to end, was facilitated by my iPod. On settling into my space at 10 in Abidjan on Saturday night I pressed the ‘90s music’ playlist and have been listening, from that moment on, nearly nonstop (with a recharge in Paris) to an interesting mix of sounds that came from nearly all continents, meditations in several languages, Nepali language lessons, acoustics and ballads sung in various languages. By the time we landed I was only on track 147 out of the available 503; enough leftovers for a few more flights like this.