Rewind and Remember

Sometimes it's easy to miss what is happening right in front of you. Sometimes you realize that there are chunks of time that you were only doing the necessary things to get to a certain point and you missed a lot of the details in between. Kind of like when you get home from a long drive and you get the feeling that you don't even remember driving. Maybe you were lost in your thoughts, but haven't even really kept track of those either. But when you finally sit down, take a break and rewind back to the beginning, you can fill in the blanks. Well, at least they seem like blanks, but you find that somewhere those moments are stored in your memory.

These last three months have been a whirlwind. And now, I'm here. It feels as though I was in Arkansas, fell asleep, and woke up married and living my life in Kigali. Now, I have to rewind and recall what exactly happened in the middle of all that glorious chaos. How everything looked, who I encountered, what I was thinking, how I reacted. That last one is a little more convicting. With so many feelings at flooding in at once, and not just your typical, wedding-related emotions, I am sure I wasn't perfectly peachy all of that time. But the thought of all the tireless effort my husband's family put in to planning and pulling off our wedding and the sacrifice my family made to be here for everything, followed by the thought of how superlative the whole thing was, all of that reminds me that I have just lived something that very few Americans get to experience. In the middle of the fear, frustration and confusion that go along with moving to a foreign country, it's easy to occasionally forget how incomparable and priceless those experiences were and how grateful I am for them.

Rewinding back even further...

I think about all the events that fell into place that got me engaged to this guy in the first place. I remember having a playful conversation with him, in a bar, surrounded by our friends, trying to decipher whether he was interested in me or not. I remember him grabbing my hand for the first time and me with no particular care that I might marry him and end up living in his home country, just happy that I was the one that got to have his attention. Then I think about all of the silly arguments, all of the back and forth thoughts of whether or or not this would work out, especially when he was here and I was back in the States, and in spite of all of that, I'm sitting across from him in our living room, looking at him, thinking to myself I wouldn't change any of it for the world. I wouldn't pick anyone else, had I the option to go back. At this point, I can say that I have lived a pretty lucky life.

Then, sometimes there are chunks of time you would rather not fill in the blanks. All you want to do is know that you made it through to the other side, and figure out how to move on. I think about my friends...my husband...every single person I pass on the street who experienced something so dreadful that I could never even begin to compare any of my experiences to what they went through. It all happened so fast. But i'm sure some moments seemed to last forever to them. A word floating around during memorial week in 2014 (the 20th anniversary of the genocide) was "Kwibuka". Remember.  I see how so many people here live full, inspiring lives, and I think, to have those memories in your mind...how do you just "remember"? Remembering this is not like remembering where you put your keys or what happened last weekend. I'm guessing, anyway. I'm guessing it's a little bit like fumbling for an off button. Like you're trying to study, but your neighbor keeps blasting music no matter how many times you ask them to keep it down. But I don't know. I can't know.

Not to get all morbid on you, but this is what it's all about for me now. Living my life in the middle of all their lives. As different as our memories are, as relative as as the definition of a good day is, I'm getting transportation, ordering at restaurants, buying groceries, making new friends, and I'm figuring out how to express myself in order to accomplish all of that. Me with all of my blissful memories, and only relatively uncomfortable memories. It's different than back home. The fact that I'm different than the vast majority of people here is painfully obvious. But somehow we all find our common humanity and we go from there.