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OBRUNI IN GHANA 79
happy with his seat. The AFS students requested eight seats together but we couldn’t be more randomly spaced if we had asked for that instead.
This day always seemed to be on the far side of forever. I can’t even register; I’ve gone numb again. Natalie told me she wished she could just skip forward two weeks. It’s not the leaving, she says, it’s the culture shock. I keep daydreaming that first night alone in my room. All the noise and surprise has gone and that’s when it hits me. Will I cry? Will I laugh?
I hear the others on my flight to London murmuring, “I can’t believe this is really happening.” I feel it flowing past me more naturally than I expected. Here I sit, on my luxurious plane seat with a woven wool blanket and a personal TV while the picture of my homecoming grows ever clearer. Meanwhile the sensation of a packed tro-tro (a knee shoved into my crotch), or walking through the loud, smelly, exuberant filth of the market, is wisping away like smoke. The fantastic reality of African is receding like a dream into the merely fantastic.