Yesterday I realized I forgot what Japanese pancakes are called, I couldn’t remember one of my kids’ names from Ecuador, and I don’t know whether it was Colombia or Thailand where they fed us pig intestines.
This sparked a momentary crisis wherein I wondered if someday I might forget that I’d gone on the World Race at all.
See, I haven’t let myself look at a single photo or reread a single blog post or open any of my journals from the Race since the day I got off my last plane, and I’ve avoided talking about it whenever possible.
Today I’m doing all four of the above, and it feels like dunking my heart in battery acid.
But it’s also reminding me how the day we took our Cambodian students to the movies for the first time in all their lives, and the day me and Courtney and Whitney went to the orphanage in Malaysia, and the night of our super feedback in Thailand, will still be in the top five best days of my life when I’m 95.
And how the night we almost set our hut on fire in Swaziland will never not be funny.
How on every one of my birthdays for the rest of my life, I’ll tell someone about how it was 23 degrees out when I turned 23 in Bolivia, how Justin and Dillon searched the whole city to get me a jar of peanut butter, and when they couldn’t find it they bought me a cake with extra icing on it instead, because they knew I don’t like cake but I LOVE icing.
How every time I go to the zoo I’ll think about hugging giraffes and petting lion cubs in South Africa, and every time I watch the Avengers I’ll remember how the sequel premiered a week earlier in Botswana than it did in America.
Little things will eventually slip through the cracks of my brain, but the important ones will never find their way out. I may forget a lot of people’s names, but I’ll never forget their hearts.
What a year.
