iLiza's eyes

There are days that are better than others.

Some days feel like old times. They feel like life the way you left it: busy, whirling with normalcy, but happy. They seem to push you in ways that you expect to be pushed: you're running between subway stops, living by your planner, stressed out about the next assignment. The normal days feel normal-- they feel like you never left. They feel like the two months when you were gone didn't exist, like the reel was cut and July 1st and August 22nd were glued together and nothing happened in between. Maybe nothing did. Those days feel so similar that it seems that nothing changed, we're all the same, and it was just one long night and one vivid dream that lives in a past that you'll never be able to reach again.

But culture shock is a weird thing. It hits you in all different ways, from all different sides and it lingers in you. Culture shock is like anesthesia--it gets in your body and puts you to sleep, and stays there, even after you awake.

They say that for every hour you're under, it takes a month for your body to get over the anesthesia. If that's the case with culture shock, I'll be like this forever.

The days that aren't normal are hard. They slip your sub-conscious into a catatonic state. You'll be having a conversation, and a part of your brain feels like it falls away-- you are listening in Spanish, you are living in a hut, you are totally transposed to someplace else and as a result, you can't function anywhere.

It hits you in other strange ways as well. You watch a movie, and you can't quite understand why it's in English. You can't understand why people care so much about some things and not others; and when you have nothing to say it's because you're grappling with the fact that that tiny village with the little girl of the future is still there, they are still meeting every Friday. They are meeting right now. Is that real?

Culture shock doesn't let you feel pain. You have felt pain and seen pain, and so it seems that you cannot feel it again. If I feel myself suffering, panicking, unable to breathe, I can relieve it all when I think of the people in the back of the truck who I cried for. When I think of the love, I think of the pain in leaving--and that is greater than my panic attack or my frustration.

It's the bad days that make you realize that even the good days aren't so normal and aren't so good. You realize that they are lightly weighted with sadness, or an inability to be completely happy. They are silently traumatic and they just don't feel quite right. They are burdened with a sense of responsibility and guilt. They are laced with the incredible need to go back, the overwhelming sense that you are failing what you saw. They are so normal, so peaceful, you feel that they can't be real either. The normalcy can't be real, because if it is, the abnormalcy you lived seems it cannot exist.

So everyday I hope that shock is like anesthesia, that it will linger and hold on. I hope it continues to remind me everyday of the inconsistency and of how our realities are just all so unreal.

posted by iliza @ 11:59 AM 0 comments

I failed to write in my blog over the summer, which is ironic because before I left for Peru, all I thought about was how ready I was to blog away while I was there. What I forgot was that writing can't be forced, and that sometimes when we experience things we cannot truly understand them until we've had some time away.

One of the first days that I was in Peru, I went to the computer lab at the unversity where I was studying. I signed in to the blog that I had set-up before I left, and sat in front of that blinking computer line that bounces around an empty page, taunting writers as it screams, "I'm ready! What are you gonna give me?!"

I stared at that line for a few minutes that morning in Lima, and for the first time since I had arrived, my mind went blank. I remember it going blank, rebooting itself from fear of the overwhelming amount of information that flooded it, and so deciding that nothing, in fact, was going on at all. I closed the page and said adios to the line. I haven't opened it since today because now I think I'm done rebooting.

I thought of Lima today when I woke up. In the 7:30AM shadows on a fairly humid mid-September morning in New York, apparently you can close your eyes, and feel like you're in a Lima winter. It was mostly the fact that you can't really tell if your chilly, too warm or comfortable, and that the air is so moist, you feel like you can squeeze it and mold it with your seemingly damp fingers. That's what made me want to write: that small moment, half asleep, buying a second cup of coffee, I when shut my eyes for just 10 seconds and imagined I was there. I believed it for two, and that was good enough to get me through my day.

So I'll keep writing. Until I go away again...

posted by iliza @ 4:52 PM 0 comments