It’s twenty-seven degrees in my room, but I am freezing. My body is laying flat in bed and my eyes are forcing me to keep them shut, they are not ready for a new day. I fall into some sort of half-ass sleep where I enter dreamland. I dream of all the experiences I’ve had the last couple of days and all my thoughts become vivid imagery. I see the ones I hold dear in Sweden, they have come to Ghana and we are all living here in Accra. I believe this dream is a creature of fear. The fear of loosing my loved ones, a fear that always strikes me when I am leaving for a new adventure. Whenever I leave my comfort zone and head into the unknown the realization of how fragile life is always dawns on me.
I am yanked out of sleep by a massive thunderstorm, it feels as if my bed is shaking and I am comforted by the intensity, the power it holds and the way it makes me feel insignificant, like the mountains tend to do, as if all my thoughts and my being is nothing, compared to the wild, wild nature. Straight after the rumbling, Chloé, a four month old labrador puppy starts screaming. Maybe she is frightened out there in her little box. I feel the urge to go out and pick her up, but that would be nothing but a bad favor with good intentions, she will live here for the rest of her life and has to learn the hard way.
The first day in Ghana I was a little knot of anxiety, as always when I am somewhere new, the first day is a blurr of what I left behind and what is to come. Philippe took us out to a restaurant called Republic and we were thrown into the Ghanaian life in Accra, a big bustling, hustling crazy environment with a strong sensation of life that I seldom see in Sweden. The ball of anxiety was a bit different this time, I had been in a bubble of getting to know someone special back home for several weeks and being thrown out of that exhillirating, frightening delight, was something new for me. The day before leaving I bid on an apartment and signed a sheet that would allow my father to continue bidding when I was on the plane. I played with the thought of actually winning the bidding when we were up in the air and it felt too unreal, at the same time my gut-feeling told me I would. As inklings of the gut have it, I turned on my phone when we arrived at Philippe’s, and there it was, the message from my father saying that ”You have an apartment! Congratulations!”. My thoughts were spinning faster and faster and the surrealism of the situation was no where near graspable. Here I was in Ghana, a completely new country, for me, in Africa, with a wild fiery friend named Camilla, and back home I had just gotten an apartment on my dream-location in Stockholm. Add the weird sensation of still having someone else’s soft lips on my mine, as if I could still feel his smell and touch, my mind kind of exploded into, yeah, what? Overload?
These past couple of days we have been by the pool, been at a skybar at Villaggio, been to a nightclub where someone stole my cool Jack Daniel’s T-shirt that I bought in the bar (it was black and gold), and yesteerday we hung out at a beautiful hotel and we saw the ocean! A polluted ocean but still, how good did that wind from the sea feel on my face?
Josie Mattsson 