Reach

It happens sometimes, that I find myself in Africa. Not literally of course, but on occasion I will find myself faced with an overwhelming sense of the life I left, the place, the people, the essence.

Sometimes it’s an email from one of the multiply named Africans I had met at some point while I was there and half heartedly gave my email address to, certain the stars (and the generators, and the internets) would probably never actually align for them to contact me. I’ll see an email in my inbox with a name I can’t even recognize and I know it’s one of them, the fact that I can’t really figure out which one matters not. I appreciate in a way many cannot what it takes for them to send me a message and it fills my heart to the point of aching.

The other day one of the police officers from Seronga skyped me, and it took everything in me to hide my tears of joy at the sound of an African saying my name, because although he found jenniferkatchmark he was speaking to Lorato, and it would have never occurred to him to address me by anything else. I quickly lapsed into my African English accent, the way we all came to speak when speaking English to an African because it seemed they could understand us better that way. When the video picked up and I could SEE him, and hear the generators in the background, I found myself even loving the delay that made conversation difficult because it meant it was real, I was able to speak to that life I knew, I could see it. It meant that that piece of my life indeed had happened. Because being here, it’s easy for me to sometimes doubt it.

Sometimes it’s seeing someone I served in the Peace Corps with that takes me back. Whenever one of them is within about a hundred mile radius of me, I swear to you I would crawl over glass to be with them, to be in their space, to breathe in their air. This sounds a little dramatic, perhaps, but I’ve come to feel about them the way I feel about my village. Through being with them I can indulge the love I feel but keep locked away, I can speak Setswinglish, I can say the things my heart feels so often but I cannot say because I am incapable of making someone truly understand. Being with those who knew the palce, who shared the experience allows me to go back a little bit, for a little while. Because there’s so much of that other life that in living here, I’ve had to leave behind. I can open those doors I usually keep closed so as to try to live in the present, where I am now, so as not to suffer from the actual physical pain of missing where I’ve been.

Seronga, my Seronga, the real version I hold of the village, lives in the secret rooms I’ve created for it in my heart. I don’t welcome anyone into those chambers any more than I would offer up my underwear drawer for a stranger to rifle through. Although I probably speak about Botswana, and Africa and the Peace Corps a lot, and people think I’m speaking about my village, when I talk to other people, I’m actually giving them a Wikipedia version I’ve developed in my head. Although it seems otherwise, I’m usually speaking about as it matter-of-factly as if I were giving a book review, rather than from the perspective of the author who lived the story.

I can sometimes be good at compartmentalizing.

For if I lived for there still, I couldn’t really be here.

From day to day I can’t maintain that kind of love for the village, because over time it would wreck me. I learned a lot about yearning for the things that aren’t here in front of you, and the phases of misery that it can put you through. Just like when I was there I had to lock away so much of life here in America to be fully present there, now I have to keep Botswana hidden away. I have to protect it to preserve its purest form, the one I knew, lest it become some sort of caricature through my efforts to make it real for everyone else.

So sometimes I find myself there. Like a shadow or a mirage or a dream it's there. And I reach my fingers out to touch it as gently as a raindrop, or a snowflake or a ray of sun being chased by the shadow of a cloud. I marvel at the moment's beauty and I feel it deeply and it hurts a little. For it's always accompanied by the painful knowledge that this moment in which I've been lucky enough to go back is only that, a moment, a fleeting wrinkle in time and space for which I'm grateful and yet I dread. It feels so real.