I have two classes in la salle afrique each week and there have been three weeks of classes. That means I have sat through six classes in this room and yet only today did I realize that I had never even looked at the window. Too consumed by the pressing need to convert the words on the board to paper, I completely overlooked a single detail that made me take an appreciative pause.
Perhaps completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but ivy grows just outside of the classroom. On one side of the window the ivy is slowly climbing up the glass, its little roots holding fast in the upward climb against gravity, while on the other side of the window the ivy has obviously been ripped away, its absence notable only by the stains left behind on the wall.
The class discussion goes on around me - something about economy and grocery stores - and I try to figure out why that stain on the wall seems so important to me. I wonder if I've recently excised some part of myself in my transition process to life in France, but I can't feel any hollow ache.
There is a feeling, a very nameless feeling growing inside me. Impossible to put into words, but the best way I can think of to describe it is to tell you that I feel as if I've expanded past my shape and definition into...what exactly? The infinite? The unknown?
One question breeds another until my head is filled with them, each buzzing as I turn my mind back to economy. The one that lasts the longest is the hardest to dispel: Which am I, the ivy growing or the ivy cut away?
Perhaps completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but ivy grows just outside of the classroom. On one side of the window the ivy is slowly climbing up the glass, its little roots holding fast in the upward climb against gravity, while on the other side of the window the ivy has obviously been ripped away, its absence notable only by the stains left behind on the wall.
The class discussion goes on around me - something about economy and grocery stores - and I try to figure out why that stain on the wall seems so important to me. I wonder if I've recently excised some part of myself in my transition process to life in France, but I can't feel any hollow ache.
There is a feeling, a very nameless feeling growing inside me. Impossible to put into words, but the best way I can think of to describe it is to tell you that I feel as if I've expanded past my shape and definition into...what exactly? The infinite? The unknown?
One question breeds another until my head is filled with them, each buzzing as I turn my mind back to economy. The one that lasts the longest is the hardest to dispel: Which am I, the ivy growing or the ivy cut away?
No comments:
Post a Comment