Memories

Some evenings I told my family (including Mohamed, who now lived with us) stories about my trip. I described everything to them – the airfield, the airport, the plane, what it felt like to see clouds from the window of the plane. I would have a tingling sensation in my stomach as I remembered walking on a moving sidewalk in the Amsterdam airport. I had never seen so many white people, all hurriedly dragging their bags and running in different directions. I told them about the people I had met, the tall building of New York City, how people cursed on the street; I did my best to capture the snow and how it grew dark so early.

“It sounds like a strange trip,” my uncle would remark. It felt, to me, like something that had all happened in my mind (Beah 201).

I was seventeen when I got to the U.S. I know that here it’s normal for young people of that age to live separately from their parents, but it’s not in the country where I am from. Kids can live with their parents until they start their own families. That is why it felt so strange to me to be all by myself in a country where I know nobody. I remember my first time in an airplane, and the first stop was at the Amsterdam airport, just as Ishmael’s. And just as he, I was astonished by the view from those little windows on a height of 10000 meters. Before that day, I had never seen such tall buildings.

I called my parents as soon as I got to Minnesota, and told them every little detail of my trip. I couldn’t believe that I was so far away from home. You can’t even imagine how many times I would wake up at night, disoriented, not knowing where I was )).

This passage has brought all of these memories to my mind. I believe, that is why I chose it.