Lament

My mother, to whom you should all write letters and Facebook messages, imploring her to write a book, or at least blog every day, or at least once a week, wrote about a recent trip to Uganda. Besides it being a really beautiful post, it is essentially affectionate of the past, and hopeful. Which I am striving to be, but which did not emerge at all in this little thing I wrote a few months ago, and didn't post then, because, well, who knows why. But after all the Facebook World Cup chatter and trying to think about who I would really root for (is that really how you spell that? That seems wrong. I would have said route, but Matt vehemently disagrees), I thought I might as well, because I didn't write anything else today.

Stage One–Leaving Home

The flame of the candle flickered and fell, wax dripping onto the table cloth, ants wandering around among the crumbs. What could be more romantic and exotic than a dark, deep African night. Probably a monkey danced around over our heads in the tree, my tree, the big mango tree that sat, covered all the time in red ants, in the center of the courtyard.

But there is no romance in the pit of the stomach, the drop of the heart in knowing and understanding, for real, for true, that you are definitely going away to school after all. You sit, your feet dangling down, oppressed in the darkness, caught in a sea of loss.

Anyway, the house was melting away in the rains. Girls everywhere were preoccupied with pounding grain and running errands and working in the fields. I couldn't spell and couldn't do fractions. It was going to have to be proper school.

School you go away to. School that goes on even when class is over. School where the regulations of everything take up all the available emotional space. School where you lie in bed at night and feel the heavy weight of loneliness and sorrow press onto your chest and wish for the dawn. School where you have to do organized sports and if you have a bad attitude, everyone thinks you must have a spiritual problem. Which of course you do. Everyone has some kind of spiritual problem.

Much later, reading through Facebook threads and skimming over articles or even running into people who say they LOVED it, they wouldn't have traded it for anything, you wonder, you puzzle, you say to yourself, 'they either forgot, or they were never paying attention.'

Its all about light and dark for me and Africa. Its about dust and heat and loss. Its about always saying goodbye to people. It's ultimately and most completely about never going home. Always trying to make the place you're in Home, but never succeeding. The fleeting moments of contentment drive constantly back the deep abiding stream, the well of loss. You try to put the lid on. You do. You succeed. And then suddenly it wells up and you drink again.

Can you go home? Someone asked me just the other day. Without a breath I said, 'No.' No. No you can't go home. You can look out of the windows of your home, in the narrow places of your mind. You can try to remember. You can try to make it exist now. You can wade through laundry and clutter driving back the chaos and making a Home. 'Let's go home' you can say at the end of a long day out. 'We're going home' you can say to your child whining in the back of your car. But you can't get there. You drive all the way and go in and still look out some other set of windows, some place and set of people that aren't there with you now.