Mostly, when I think about the number of boxes I packed up and took to my parents’ house before my half-move to Rwanda, I can’t believe how much crap I own.
But there are things I miss. The first time I came to Rwanda, I packed for the short work trip it was: a few simple skirts, t-shirts in plain colors (following guidance I’d been given by a group I traveled with: nothing tight-fitting, shoulders covered), a pair of dress shoes, a pair of sneakers I practically lived in. Not enough socks, as usual.
This time, I remembered how desperately I yearned for something not cut like a box or dyed in a Wal-Mart color when I got back. (It is no coincidence that in the three months following my return from Rwanda, I added the three colors that are still, to this day, the most outrageous in my collection of fishnets.) So I packed a little more like a girl. I brought some scarves. My favorite bits of jewelry. Makeup (me?!). A sundress I still haven’t worn, because somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m holding out: I didn’t bring a lot of stuff, given that I’m here six months, and like a woman anywhere, I want to have one thing saved up, in case I want to wear something special.
Not because the dress is all that special–it’s rather ordinary, and at this point, it’s even too big. But the simple act of not having worn it yet has elevated it. (In America, says the Voice of National Myth, even our clothes are socially mobile!)
Which is, in its own way, a form of materialism, I suppose. So while I’m being a material girl, here are other things I wish I had:
- Girly shoes. Anything with a heel, or a cute strap.
- The rest of my jewelry…
- My banana bread pan.
- Shirts that sparkle. The number of things in my New York wardrobe that glimmer, and I am here with but one shiny scarf…
- My favorite perfume, which I don’t even own any more. But I miss it. (Confession: I did bring one, an untouched legacy gift of an old relationship, and I thought–rightly–that if it were the only one I had, I might learn to like it.)
- The little baking-spice kit my cousins gave me as a gift a few months before I left. With vanilla. Pure baking vanilla. Not that I can’t find it here, but it’s pricey, and that stuff was just so good…
- DVDs.
- My violin, which I miss the way you miss waking up next to someone after a break-up…
Some of this is stupid. Girly shoes? Let’s be honest, that’s just plain vanity. But there are some things that become so inextricably a part of who you are–a girl who buys bananas she knows she won’t eat just for an excuse to bake–that, after awhile, you start to miss yourself.
