That Awkward Moment

That awkward moment. When your prude princessy arse is taken out of its comfort zone. Way out. Say...7000 km. When one afternoon, without too much warning, you find yourself away from everything you are familiar with, both literally and figuratively. When your common sense is so peculiar to your new environment that you cannot do anything else but smile, and...wait. For something, or everything, to happen.

It only takes an email announcing you you're flying to Lagos soon, to be living there for half a year. After a series of initial "OMGs" and "WTFs" and "why me's", you experience a complete change in your priorities. You suddenly start telling people more [of course in a very awkward way] how much they mean to you. Not that you didn't love them before. But the perspective of being shipped thousands of miles away makes it more necessary to express it. So your love declarations fly out as often as you fly back home. Which is disturbingly often, to somehow compensate for the months you skipped before and the absent months you are about to serve. The logic of that? None whatsoever.

Then you start preparing. Physically but mostly mentally. You oscilate a million times between "f this shit, I'm going home" and "f, let's do this, I'm moving to Nigeria" with no clear pattern and of course, no logic in your decision making process. You discover how difficult it is to obtain a visa for this country, while running around to put together a huge pile of requested documents. You take a million shots against all these weird diseases, panic in the process, go again through the two gate decision tree, and make up your mind on moving forward. Buy all these crazy things and stuff your luggage with blond hair products and medicine, cause you don't expect to find them here. And you're superficial and prejudiced, but you're right.

You start asking random people for their opinion. They divide themselves into two big groups: the "Oh wow" and the "Oh yay", which of course doesn't help you in any way. You hear annoyingly often words like challenging, interesting, different, fascinating, which can only mean trouble. You start asking for input from people who've experienced the same thing. They give you precious information (to which you react either by panic or nervous laughter) but tell you that some things cannot be explained, you have to see them for yourself to understand. You have no idea what they're talking about, and imagine they are just being unnecessarily mysterious. You understand immediately what they meant once you set foot at the destination.

You pack, fly the longest flight in your life, land, scared shitless and embrace it all, even if sometimes forcedly. People ask you how you find it, you say challenging, interesting, different, fascinating...way too often. Then you say that some things cannot be explained, one has to see them for oneself to understand. They have no idea what you're talking about.

That awkard moment. When you are thorn between living The experience of your life and living Your life.