I'm on my way to the trash pit when my host mom stops me as I'm walking out the door.
"What are you throwing away?" she asks, her short, dark body blocking my exit with her hands outstretched towards the contemptuous items in my arms.
My breath catches in my chest like the skip-skipping of a worn-out vinyl as she gasps and pulls the objects into her palms - two plastic cartons of molded, week-old grapes that I had bought and forgotten at the bottom of the freezer chest. Dispensable objects that I had purchased out of the supposition that "I should probably eat more fruit", on top of all the other bagged and bottled nonsense I blew my weekly spending money on.
Within six seconds the entire family is gathered around her and I'm edged out of the clamoring of hands, each reaching into the grape pile like they've never seen a grape before in their lives. My next thought is probably also yours: what if they never have?
I back away, my face red with shame, the receipt for the chocolate cake I just bought for the housekeeper heavier than a sack of rocks in my pocket. $6.50 for a cake, thanking her for spending her free evening doing my hair. Her reaction had been equal parts delight and uncertainty; she hadn't even picked it up. I wonder how many cartons of grapes $6.50 could have bought her, how many pairs of socks or liters of gas or trips to the doctor's office. A boy in church this morning shared that his leg had been run over by a tractor when he was 16 and how he had to wait two days in agony before finding enough money to walk himself to a hospital. I bet he would rather have had money in his hand than a cake in his kitchen.
I live in a decaying house infested with rats and every night I swear it's the last night I can hold myself together. But every morning when we take out the garbage to the shallow pit in front of the property, I see at least one family member digging through our trash for salvageable goods, and I'm reminded of the fact that six months from now, this won't be my normal.
For these people, however, it will be the only life they ever know.
In six months, I'll be back in my mom's house on the second floor, with three pillows and a closet full of of nonsense, my favourite restaurant the same 18 minute drive away, the Bloody Mary's and margarita doughnuts arranged on vintage yellow tables with floral centerpieces.
In six months, I won't wake up with swollen legs from bug bites or stomach aches from too much bread.
In six months, I'll have the option to pretend that I never saw some of the things I've seen on the World Race. But, here's the thing.
When you love something, it always leaves behind a token. You can bleach and scrub the halls of your memory from top to bottom and leave the windows open throughout the night, but there will always linger remnants of what used to be.
My decision is not to let these stories, these people, become the temporary interior decoration of my mind and heart. They aren't place-holder trinkets to be removed or taken down when the next exciting season of life comes along, and they aren't dinner party conversations when you finally run out of things to share about yourself. They are people, and the moments us Racers had with them, however chaotic and frightening, were moments when we brought heaven to earth.
Their sometimes dreary colours will clash with the the chromatic gloss of life back in the USA, where we can turn our faces from the broken as easily as we turn television channels.
It will hurt to feel. It will hurt to remember.
But if all you did with them was share an experience you planned to forget, why did you bother looking into their eyes at all?
22 year-old Amir told me that he cannot write under the name his mother gave him for fear that his poetry describing the persecution of gays in Iran will land his family in prison - or worse. So he sticks with memorizing his poems to recite to me as we sit on cement blocks a few hundred few from the sleeping bodies of 2,000 displaced refugees, families forced to share a single travel blanket as gravel from the parking lot digs into their children's shoulder-blades and backs.
In Greece, I looked into the bloodshot eyes of seven year old kids, lips blue from the cold and clothing caked with dried saltwater, grasping at packets of crackers with trembling fingers. I pulled a soaked baby girl from the arms of a terrified teammate when her face turned white and her voice cracked, "I....I don't think she's breathing." Stripping her down and pulling my coat around her limp body, her gray skin against my tan chest, I looked up at the chaos unfolding around me and was filled with white-hot anger. This child did nothing to deserve this. She was brought here because of a war she didn't cause and political corruption she never participated in. Her mother is dead, body lost in a nameless grave on the dark ocean floor, and her missing father handed her to us because he couldn't bear to hold death in his arms. And, praying brokenly, I clutched her cold body, headlamp illuminating the sheets of rain coming down on the heads of the thousands of people waiting for a chance to meet me, waiting to see what I had to give them in hopes of providing just one evening of relief.
I could tell these stories a thousand times in the most animated of ways, and it will likely still do little more than make any person safe at home shift uncomfortably in their chair.
They didn't hold her. They didn't feel her body weight in their forearms. But I did.
How dare I try to forget?
Sitting protected from responsibility in coffee shoppes, our narcissism is a luxury that goes unchallenged. I have been wrecked for the ordinary. The American Dream is no longer big enough for me, because I've seen God's face in six different countries and it doesn't look like the clean-shaven face of a corporate executive or the Sephora-caked cheeks of an A-list movie star. I've had sleepless nights and shaking hands and at times, nightmares that confused themselves with reality. But God has given me the opportunity to come close to brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers that most people, wealthy or not, will never meet.
How dare I try to make my heart a more comfortable place by sacrificing the investment of time and conversation they entrusted to me? How dare I hide myself behind my old comforts, or try to dress myself up into a girl who's less offensive and flatters your sense of apathy?
I refuse.
I will keep saying hard things. I won't lose my love, and I won't turn my heart off. I will continue to make you shift in your chair, to feel something burn deep down when you would rather let someone else answer the call for help. The faces of thousands of rejected men, women and kids hang on the walls of my mind like the world's biggest bulletin board.
Instead of asking for prettier faces, I want to ask for a bigger wall. I want more heart space.
What about you?