Anyone for a sandwich?

Can you imagine what it must feel like to be stuck in a small, tight, airless, dark space for hours into days -- in a deep well, under earthquake rubble, a collapsed mine, a secret prison -- and just when hope has finally vanished for good, leaving a sucking black hole leading towards death's oncoming headlights, just when that tap-tap-tap dripping sound starts again driving a screw into your mind, and all of a sudden light and human voices! break through some wall in your consciousness, and arms reach under your armpits and drag, scraping you along some rough surface, and the voices are all so loud and incomprehensible, and the light -- the sun! is so damn bright even squinting does nothing, glare blasting your face like an atomic explosion, and you think just for a second that maybe you'd like to go back into the dark stuckness to rest your eyes and maybe people would just leave you alone? That is, as long as you could take a nice sandwich with you. Nothing fancy. Roast beef, with some lettuce and tomatoes and mustard. Not even cheese. Although it would be nice, the cheese. And you think, yeah, I probably deserve some cheese, what I've just been through. Resolved: roast beef sandwich WITH CHEESE is the first thing on the list. As soon as all these people stop clapping and rustling my hair and smiling like idiots and let me go on my way. My legs too, they would have to start working. Might that take a while? And anyways, did I miss anything important while I was down there? Probably only a day or two, couldn't have been much. I should call people just to make sure, just in case, make it look like I care so much, despite all of that dark stuckness. Sandwich first, though.

I recall strongly my first day back in Guatemala, over a month ago now. It was hot. I was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt on the plane, a layer down from New York in Winter, the same blue hooded sweatshirt I've worn on chilly fall mornings in Montreal, blustery cloudy warm days in California, and now on a sweaty January afternoon in Guatemala. Managed past customs and immigration with somewhat troubling ease and stumbled towards a taxi under the weight of my two enormous bags. I got in the back, and then apologized by explaining that I had been in the States for a month and there, everyone rides in the back of taxis. He laughed, I laughed, for no particular reason except for a beautiful day in the middle of winter. I took off my sweatshirt, rolled down the window, and caught a whiff of Returning Home, the smell of which followed me all the way back to the house and through the rest of the day, an unexpected welcome.

The intervening time has been chaotic, effective, and all sorts of other adjectives that can be applied to work or the workplace. Good, though, overall. My men's literacy classes are finally up and running, our first week just completed and a planned soccer game today. It's not perfect, but it's more or less what I had expected and planned for, and seems to be going in a solid positive direction. Still lots of work left to do, but it's pro-active and not whatever the opposite of that is: anti-active? If you ain't gettin in, you just ain't.

Is there some theme, deep or wide or otherwise, that I'm missing here? Should I -- let alone Can I -- be musing about getting older at 24? Should I be debating the merits of my decisions, the ones that landed me here like a sentient tail pinned on a donkey? Should I be digging into my psyche to uncover hidden patterns or predilections, hinting at some outline of Self, brief flash of self-awareness like a shooting star overhead? Should I be delving into romantic or otherwise personal relationships, scratching through the archives, hauling crates of memories down from the attic? Should I be in the future lab, cooking up schemes, plans, contingencies, sub-contingencies?

Tentatively, for the time being, and until futher notice, I think not. I've got a soccer game today, and I could go for a sandwich.