The tears

Tonight I’m sitting on the lanai of my hotel in Fiji.  There are frogs leaping to and fro in front of me on the lawn and pathway.  There are tiki torches lit all around the pool and across the pool a band plays happy and sad romantic songs. 

I’m thinking about my last couple days.  I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in public in my life.  On Thursday morning I said goodbye to my family at the Kona International Airport.  When they left for their gate I got in the TSA line.  I wore my Target sunglasses and tears rolled down my face.  The other people in line were mostly older couples and I’m sure they’d never seen anyone cry in a TSA line before!  

I couldn’t help myself.  It was all I could do not to run out of that line after my family and say, “Screw New Zealand.  Screw adventure.  I’m going home with you guys!”  I’m being serious.  I cried while I waited in the outdoor seating of the airport with happy Hawaiian vacationers all around me.  I cried on the plane.  When we landed in Honolulu and sat on the tarmac for an extra few minutes before deplaning I thought I would go crazy!

I cried as I waited for the airport hotel shuttle to come pick me up.  I cried after I checked into the hotel and was waiting outside for the city bus to take me to Waikiki.  I didn’t stop crying until I got on the bus and felt the comfort of having someone else in control of me for a while: the bus driver. 

But then when I got dinner at a huge Honolulu mall I cried again.  Not only was I crying but food made me feel queasy.  My mom purchased some peanut brittle right before we went to the airport.  We nibbled on it as we waited for the last possible minute to say goodbye.  She gave me some to take on my trip but I couldn’t eat it because it made me feel so homesick.  I finally threw it away when I got to Fiji.  

Then today on the plane to Fiji I began to feel better--almost confident.  I had a window seat and as the plane took off over Honolulu I looked down on the high rise hotels doused in the early morning light and put my sunglasses on.  As we flew away from Honolulu I suddenly remembered an image from my dream board back home in my bedroom.  It’s an image of a young woman sitting by an airplane window.  She is looking confidently forward.  She has short straight hair and an impossibly long neck.  She wears oversized sunglasses.  My sunglasses may not be oversized, my neck isn’t impossibly long, and my hair isn’t straight, but suddenly I felt like her.  I felt like I was flying forward.  I actually felt like that dream of being a confident traveler was actually coming true.  I sat up a little taller and straighter.  I looked forward and imagined I had a long neck.  I imagined I was that woman.  For a few minutes I felt like I’m really chasing my dreams.  They are coming true.  

Then I got to Fiji.  First I have to say the Air Pacific airline staff truly do make up the friendliest airline in the world!  The plane service and ground service were spectacular even when I was a bumbling traveler.  Here in Fiji I can tell I’ve made a lot of mistakes and blunders.  And I feel lonely.  That’s worse than feeling like a fool.  

There are groups around me playing in the pool and making friends with strangers here at the hotel.  But I sit on the outside.  I can see that one of the challenges of this trip for me is going to be speaking up and talking to people I don’t know.  I wish tonight I had had the courage for that.  But I know I’ll get there.  Pray for me that I will.  I want to truly be that confident woman by the window seat not just pretend that I am.  She’s not going to be afraid to talk to anyone, and she will make friends.  Tomorrow is a new day!  Tomorrow I will be in the country that I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about for a year.  Tomorrow I will be in the land of the long white cloud.

Goodnight my loves.