The day before leaving for a war zone I probably shouldn’t have been having waffles. I also shouldn’t have stayed up half the night. Nor should I have hired myself out as a photography instructor, a Photoshop tutor, and a personal chef. And, I should have gone straight home after all of these activities, rather than accepting a dinner invitation at my friend’s house, and definitely had no business even entertaining the idea of a possible nightcap. But extreme circumstances made me want to relish every minute of the present. Eat them up, much like the five pounds of waffles I had consumed in the last 12 hours.As a result, I found myself running around Roland’s apartment in such a frenzy that I would often forget from one minute to the next what I was doing as details about my trip that hadn’t quite been worked out surfaced in my head. You know, small details, like I didn’t actually have my plane ticket from Dubai to Kabul yet! Ah, but at least I had my visa, secured that very morning.
“Is there a place in the city where I can get a book on Dari?” I asked the embassy representative after he had handed me back my brand new passport, with the first page brandishing a one-month visa. I smiled down at it. This is going to be fun to re-enter the US with.
I looked back up at the embassy representative; he was staring at me like I was crazy. “Dari language resources?” I added hopefully.
He asks his colleague, who shakes his head.
“Oh, okay,” nodding my head to the colleague and thanking them both.
It’s a brisk fall day in Paris and I put on my headphones and walk through the park by the embassy noting the falling leaves and wondering what autumn is like in Afghanistan. Holy shit, it’s really happening, I’m going to Kabul.
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