Me and Cousin Jana

Backwards.

"That's the effect of living backwards", the Queen said kindly:

"It always makes one feel a bit giddy at first...."

Alice through the Looking Glass

Indeed it does. I have flown 20 long hours to get through the looking-glass and to say I feel giddy would be a slight under-statement. I'm in the Underworld. (Dramatic I know, it comes with the Degree.)

I knew they drove cars on the right hand side of the road here but experiencing it is completely surreal! Not so much driving in a straight line but wait for the driver to turn... It sends shivers down my spine. Water swirls down the wrong way. The flush for the toilet is placed on the wrong side. The world is a reflection of my previous self and I stare back incoherently wondering why or how I've managed to accomplish this.

I'm living with my cousin Jana and her husband Patrick in a suburb of Long Island called Great Neck. It's quite an affluent neighbourhood with lots of green foliage and water everywhere. On Saturday we might go for a swim in the Lazy River just down the road. Days are hot and moggy with frequent spells of brisk rain but no thunder or lightning a-la Jozi.

As I myself have encountered some crime in SA, it is maybe the hardest thing to accept that this huge, sprawling city, the Big Apple, is actually one of the safest cities in the world. You can take a bus/subway/train at all hours of the day or night, and people do. Dressed to the nines to go clubbing and what. I am distrustful of the calm, like I'm being tricked into believing something that will inevitably turn out to be a lie. My South African shackles are so high up I can barely see.

Perhaps this is the most important reason for my visit: to start trusting the world again. You absolutely have to if you don't know where you are, there is no way around it. And perhaps that is the hardest thing for me to learn. I think it might take me a while to take off my old hat, the one that reads: Responsible, Predictable and Well Routined, and to replace it with the cap I now carry loosely in my hand that says: Adventurer, Traveler, Fool. But I am patient. So I wait.

"I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry.

"You won't make yourself a bit realier by crying", Tweedledee remarked: "There's nothing to cry about."