These Fictional People I Have Known

Updates from Rwanda, Part 1

So…

I'm on the plane.

The plane.

To Africa.

Okay, technically, I'm on the plane to Amsterdam, which will land and I will walk over to another gate and a few hours later get on another plane, and then I'll be on the plane to Africa. We've already passed Spokane, and they just announced: nine hours and fifteen minutes to Amsterdam.

I'm watching August: Osage County on the plane, which is about the least Africa appropriate choice on the available list of options. FN1. It is, however, perfectly Diana appropriate. Not only is it a southern-tinged interpersonal drama, which is always up my alley, on top of that, the film opened with a quote from T.S. Eliot, who may be my favorite poet. If that doesn't scream Diana, I don't know what does. Already I have laughed with the gallows affection and pain of familiarity four or five times and I'm only fifteen minutes in. Every single line is something someone in my family or our neighbors growing up could have said, and might still say, if any of them were still alive.

"At least one of my girls stayed close to home. In my day, families stayed together."

It's funny how much more real that thought becomes as you get older. None of us get another chance at any of this: to be happy, to have adventure, to love and be loved. As risk averse as I am, it's that thought driving me forward: toward change, toward danger, toward life. I don't want to look back and wonder why I waited, why I wanted, why I was afraid.

And that, dear reader, is why I am going to Africa. Because I can sit on this plane and watch this movie about these fictional people I have known all my life and see them living their pain, pain that is all too familiar, right here on this tiny screen. Or I can stay home, stay safe, and be one of them. I can live a quiet life. A well-kept, well-ordered, predictable life. A life that makes everybody happy and comfortable...but me.

Or I can do something different.

"This madhouse is my home."
"Think about that statement for a second."

About a month ago, I went to New Orleans with one of my best friends, frequent Feminine Things. featured player, the Kate. And something happened to me over that weekend.

Maybe it was because I am thirty-six now, and I remember my own momma when she was even younger than me, being one of the most miserable people I have ever known. FN2. Maybe it's because I know my daddy died at fifty-two, and that feels scarily closer to me now than the misty and watercolored days of youth do these days. Maybe it's because my grandmother beat it into me that she wanted me to live a life she wanted and set me on this path before she died, also far too young...

...but when you really think about it, who doesn't?

Anyway, something happened to me in New Orleans. Some part of me...unspooled. I think it's been happening for a little over a year, starting right about the time I decided to quit law for good and do whatever it took to start enjoying my life. By the time I got to my birthday in New Orleans, I think the last of whatever it was that I've been hanging onto, whatever it is that's been holding me back, just fell away.

I drank like I never have. I danced in the street. I ate good food, and lots of it. I bought all the prettiest perfumes I could find: magnolias and honeysuckles, leathers and mosses, and I have been wearing them ever since. And when the little old Irish men paraded by asking for a kiss on the cheek, I kissed them twice and took their roses and and then I took some more.

While I was there, I just…woke up. I was happy. I was alive. It's like I was under some terrible spell I hadn't even known had been cast, and something about the briny Gulf air and dark roux and sweet rum and loud music woke me up inside.

I don't wanna go back to sleep any more.

"Well, genocide always seems like such a good idea at the time."

So here I am on my first plane, which will land in Amsterdam, technically, tomorrow morning. My grandmother never got to go to Europe. My Pawpaw did, for the war, but they never went back. I don't think he ever wanted to. That's usually how these things go in a life. Men go; women stay home, or if they're lucky, like when my grandmother was when my Pawpaw got stationed in Guam, they get taken along for the ride. But they don't just go -- not by themselves, not alone, not out into that great wide unknown. Chalk it up to traditional child rearing roles or women having less personal wealth or some sort of cultural impetus that makes one think that this is the way of the world, but women don't go.

I am not going to be one of those women.

I am going to Africa, and I am going right now, right as I write you these words. I am going to see someone like me: someone brave and amazing, a woman I love and adore, who has moved to Rwanda alone, just her and the cat and the dog. And next year, with a little planning and luck, I am going to go see another woman I love in England, and with her I will finally get to go to Paris and visit Grasse, which I think is what perfume people think heaven must be like.

"Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed."

I am going to Africa, where the women I come from, like my grandmother, have never been. And I will laugh. And I will drink. And I will dance. And I will live for my grandmother and every woman before her and hope that she would be proud of me, even as I fail. Even when I fall. I am going to see gorillas and walk through trees and help navigate as Ashley drives us across the country.

I am going to Rwanda. I wonder if my grandmother would have liked it. Knowing her, she would have complained it wasn't enough like home. But I like to think that whatever part of her lives on in me is going to have a good time just the same. And in the end, that's the best gift you can give anyone you have loved and lost. You can take them with you and give that little part of them the chance to keep right on living with every breath you take.

"Listen to me. Die after me, alright? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life. Just... Survive. Please."

I may not get everything right in my life. I may die still heavily in debt. I may never be notable or accomplished in my professional life. I may never have a family. Those are all things I may not be able to control.

But if that's the way things are going to go, I say -- let it. Let me die young. Let me die penniless. Let me die alone. Only let me live first. Let me laugh and dance and sing without fear or caring about how I look to other people. Let me feel something, anything, for as long as I am able.

Then when that inevitable day comes, at least I will be able to look at it and say, to paraphrase Connie Willis:

"Death. Now that would be an awfully big adventure."

_________
FN1. For the record, it was this, Frozen, or Philomena based on my tastes. I think I chose well.

FN2. I am only just realizing as I write you these words that she was thirty-six when she left us. That's new information for me, consciously at least. I wonder if I've been unconsciously thinking for a while.