I’ve been away from home for over three months now. I’m physically and mentally exhausted, ready to keel over at any moment and give up on this entire voyage. I am run into the ground with emotions and work and experiences and expectations. In a day here I wake up and roll over not knowing where in the world I am or what I’m doing, how long my hair is, or if the vivid dreams I’m having are real or not. Sometimes I’m not even sure what reality is—how can one determine if dreams or life is real, when your dreams seem more real than your everyday life? Last night, or instance, I dreamed that I was home, heading off to school in Rhode Island with long hair and many dreams. Then I woke up to a country on the other side of the world, about to get on a 200 mile per hour train in order to go to the spot where the first atomic bomb was dropped and over 140,000 people died less than seventy years ago. Tell me, which seems more real to you?
I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe I’m doing these things, I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ve changed like I’ve changed. It’s as though the old world I once loved is a thousand years ago on a world far from here; a world with no suffering and pain and death. A world which housed worries such as who had the better car and who had the hotter boyfriend is dead to me now, replaced by a world in which less money than I spend on snacks in a week can feed and house a child in Mauritius for an entire year. There are times in which I have wanted desperately to go back to being ignorant of these things, but moments later I realize that there is no going back and that it is better that way. I am a different person than I was back then, and it is all for the better.
On the ride to Hiroshima these thoughts haunted me. As I watched unfamiliar landscapes become familiar, I thought of all I had both lost and gained on this voyage. I didn’t understand a single word that was being said around me, but strangely enough, it didn’t matter. I felt as though I understood these people more than I understood the people from my own country simply because I can make up conversations they are having. To the best of my knowledge they are talking about how to help those starving and being murdered, though inside I know that they are probably talking about the same things my classmates are talking about back at the bars. As I said before, ignorance is bliss.
I chose to experience Hiroshima alone because I knew it was the final large trip of this voyage for me. I needed to try and sort out some things because it was the last chance I had—on the ship there is no time or place to be alone and reflect, and that was all there was left before being thrown into the lion’s den back at home. “What was your favorite port,” they’ll ask. “-and what did you learn? Did you have fun? Was it worth it? Did you see anything crazy?”
“What was your favorite port?”—there wasn’t one. All but a few touched my heart in ways that are unexplainable in words. “What did you learn?”—I learned that everything I’ve lived for has been a lie and a joke. That all the things I’ve held dear to me have no value. That everything I’ve ever known is nothing at all. “Did you have fun?”—yes. No. Maybe. God, how can you answer this question? I loved this voyage with every fiber of my heart while hating it at the exact same time. There were days when I couldn’t stop laughing and days when I couldn’t stop crying. Fun? That wasn’t part of the description of Semester at Sea. It isn’t about fun, although I’ll admit to having some of it. No, this wasn’t about fun. It was about torture. It was about the way in which you torture yourself by growing more than a normal person does in a lifetime or more in the course of three months.
“Did you see anything crazy?” No, I saw nothing crazy. I only saw people sleeping in puddles of mud and missing limbs and carrying their near-dead babies and sobbing and praying to God or Allah or Shiva or whatever they may or may not believe in. I only saw babies deformed and parents gone and AIDS ripping the world apart, but the people still thankful for every damned breath they took. I saw nothing crazy at all in this time. After all, the majority of people I saw were actually happy to be living in these conditions. How can it be something crazy when people are actually smiling when they are dying? It isn’t crazy that people are so thankful simply being alive that they can live in these conditions day after day and still be thankful to be alive.
Hiroshima. Reality. Where I was, rather than where I’d been. As everything else on this voyage, it was something out of a dream. The dome in front of me, the paper crane memorial to the side, Japanese children running all around as though there were no worries in the world—this is what I saw. It’s hard to imagine that this was one of the last wars that we were in; in what seems like no time ago, these people were our enemies and our targets. Now here I am, helping the children practice their English as they gleefully laugh at my accent when I say my name. I can’t help but wonder, though, if this is what life will be like for us in fifty or sixty years. I’m watching the children laugh and play on the monuments as their elders look on with sad eyes as they see their friend’s faces reflected in the shimmer of the sky—will I be these elders in time, watching as the children of the former Taliban take pictures of Ground Zero while my own grandchildren chat with them and laugh? Will I see Andrew and Candace’s faces crying and begging for her plane to stop and his body to be caught from his fall as I watch the children of our country swing on the replicas of the twin towers, not knowing what it was like to experience both watching that day and losing friends? Is that how these people feel, remembering the sudden heat and the crying voices and those they left behind?
I don’t know what will happen when I get home. I don’t know what will happen when I grow old. I don’t know what will happen when the years pass by and the world changes once again, leaving my generation for forgotten and what once mattered in the dust. I don’t know if any of this matters at all in the long run; but looking at the Peace Park and the Townships and the Dalit villages and the indigenous people from all around the world, I know for absolute sure that everything will be alright. As long as there is life, everything will be alright.
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