Time-traveling

I went to Michigan last week, for my spring break, to visit friends and ex-girlfriends. Michigan is my home State, the setting for my most formative years, and it's always with great pleasure that I return there. The trip was supposed to reinvigorate me: I would rest, eat my favorite foods, go on dates with my exes, visit my high school chemistry teacher (who's remained one of my very best friends to this day) and I would come back refreshed and ready to tackle the disorder I had left in my apartment and, since it had to be done, school.



But something didn't quite happen the way I had intended. I did find the trip refreshing, but instead of feeling ready to return to school, I was seduced by the vacation lifestyle. So, having returned to Iowa, I felt ready not for more school and work, but rather for more rest and leisure, a state of mind from which I have not yet completely recovered despite the resumption of classes yesterday.



So I am left to dream about Ann Arbor, the city that abandoned for Iowa City last June, the city where I left my heart, the city that I wish I could still call home, the city that gives me the impression of travelling back to a happier time every time I return. It's really been a tale of two cities: one vibrant and full of life, the other drab and boring; one the epitome of diversity, the other the epitome of uniformity; one a shopper's dream, the other a shopper's nightmare; one full of ethnic foods, the other full of... nothing much. No wonder I feel so homesick.



I like time-traveling, or at least what I call time-traveling. No fancy machine, no complicated physics, merely an item, or a place that elicits a reminiscence. For me, that item is often food. On my way back from Ann Arbor, I stopped at a pâtisserie in Chicago to buy some French pastries. You can find croissants in many grocery store and coffee shops, but it's rare when they taste like the authentic thing, or when you can even buy a single pain au chocolat or pain au raisin. These pastries garland memories of my childhood in Abidjan, back in the early to mid 90s, back when it was still the vibrant economic capital of the greatest bastion of political stability in West Africa, back when no one could imagine that less than two decades hence, it would morph itself into a war zone.



But I digress. Time-traveling in this manner is probably superior to real-time travel, at least in one key aspect: the place one returns to is an idealized one, no one remembers the homeless person on the corner of the street, or the foul smell emanating from the neighbor's house, or the buzzing of the mosquitoes, or the murder two blocks away, or the beatings with a leather belt, or the accident on the way to school, or the two weeks spent bedridden with malaria, puking, or the corrupt police officer who stops you merely to extract a bribe. No, one only remembers the flowers, the trees, the bird songs, the warm weather, the coconut milk, the maids and chauffeur, the food, the summer spent playing video games and football, the general insouciance... it is always a tale of two cities when one travels back in time.



But, every trip, however pleasant, must come to an end... and I must head to school, to study.