Currently Listening To: Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors' Christmas Album
Quote Love: "If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years, how man would marvel and stare." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the past few weeks, I had a pretty major crisis: I lost my passport. But not to worry, everyone, after a lot of stressing, several roadblocks (who knew you needed your birth certificate to replace a lost passport? And who bring their birth certificate with them to their grandparents' house for Thanksgiving? Not me, that's for sure.), kind of a lot of money, and even more prayer (because even expedited, it still takes 2-3 weeks. And we were within the 3 week mark when the forms finally got sent in), I have my new passport. YAY! I can go to Kenya tomorrow!
However, I'm feeling a little bit nostalgic for my old passport. It was a travel log of sorts, a documentation of journeys, full of good stamps that were all tied up with good memories: my senior trip, the time I got to back to Ethiopia for just 36 hours, the Christmas break I spent freezing in Beijing. It was memento from all the hours spent on a plane, from the standing forever in a visa line in those final moments of a trip when you are just ready to be there, from that official stamp that welcomes you home or to a new adventure. Its pages were marked in Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and scrawled across with signatures of various travel authorities, stamped with the dates of several significant days. I had carried it with me through so many journeys, hated the picture in it for so long, filled out that number on so many entry forms...
And now, I just have a blank slate. And the people who check it along the way tomorrow won't know that my life is characterized by travel or that this is my fifth Kenyan visa.
But it doesn't expire until December of 2021. So maybe I'll be able to fill it with some good memories by then.
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the people who check it along the way tomorrow won't know that my life is characterized by travel
ReplyDeletetough life lol