gone

It is strange how terribly beautiful and sad it is to miss someone or somewhere. Where does the feeling come from, where does it sit? The pit of your stomach or the cradle of your vocal chords or the nape of your neck or just below that delicate curve where your ribs divide?

I have spent the past five months living in Botswana, missing America and a million things I couldn’t list on a list, and now that I’m suddenly back, I can’t help but miss in reverse. How did it happen? How did I end up back here, in my bed, a million miles away from everything that was just under my feet and in my arms and clinging to my legs – if the sandbag weight of a million thoughts and wishes isn’t enough to keep me grounded, how can I assure myself that I won’t just keep drifting from continent to continent against my will? I guess I assumed that I’d take the best back with me, I’d leave with a last look, a deep breath, a packed bag, and a locked door. I assumed that time would abide by my rules just this once, and let me glide through the months like they were my own, like plans were solid and my outlook stone.

And yet, how could I have anticipated the upheaval, the grab me by my toes and dangle me around, shake me till I frown, jingle my pockets till pula rains down kind of world shifting change? On that cool grey morning when we rolled out of bed and headed to the waiting cabs, how could we have known that I wouldn’t come back?

I never considered myself prescient, in fact, I know so little about the future that I often find myself worrying about it. However, I somehow can’t shake the feeling that I should have known this was coming, that something should have whispered it to me, a little bird should have chirped it, or a rare breeze swept a gust full of secrets into my oft-flooded dorm room. It seems so strange, even callous, that a place could let me leave it without saying goodbye, without warning me that it was going far far away for a long long time.
You can never be sure what the jacarandas know or the cracked dirt will show, yet I won’t take it personally. Sometimes the earth won’t disclose what you want it to.

So, I have a story to tell. It is long, and hot, and dry, and full of openings and closings of more things than veins. There are sand dunes and campfires, people of the unimaginable type, a one-horned oryx, an early morning airlift, and the unrealities that can only make you feel real. To start, it takes me back to Friday, October 3rd, and to end, it takes me out of Africa. Read as you will, I’ve been feeling lately that things will only make sense if you give them time.

It was in the middle of the Namib desert that things began to come apart. Sitting next to our campfire in the chill darkness of a starry night, my head began to swim with the voices of the people around me. We had watched the sun set across a deserted and surreal landscape just the hour before, and I had since consumed a good portion of our wine bottle. Thus, the strange sensation that I began to experience was at first silently excused. However, when Daniel offered me a piece of the meat that the boys had been braaing, the what-once-seemed-succulent beef suddenly transformed into a sickening lump in my throat. I grabbed D’s hand and asked him to walk me back to our tent.

Despite two flashlights, our path through the trees was dark and meandering. I was overcome by the overwhelming urge to fall into the sand, and it was only Daniel’s supporting arms that got me onto my bed. Eager to have the feeling, the embarrassment, and the problem go away, I reassured myself and him that I had probably just drunk too much, and I passed out.

A few hours later I awoke to Daniel by my side, wide eyed with concern. For a few moments I thought I was fine, until a rolling pain hit me at the bottom of my abdomen and I became a fetal curl of whimpering fear. “I drank too much and have cramps” I kept telling myself, but as Daniel fed me water and advil throughout the night, I wasn’t sure.

The next morning we woke up before dawn to drive out to the famous dunes of Soussusvlei, and I was feeling tolerably better. The hours in the car were not the most comfortable of my life, but I put anxiety and small pains aside to focus on the day’s exciting events. We watched a magnificent sunrise, climbed impossibly huge dunes, saw a one-horned oryx (the original unicorn), and eventually piled back into our cars to begin the almost nine hour drive back to Windhoek.

Open windows provided a cooling breeze and turned us into pale dust monsters, and we spent the majority of the trip listening to the same cd on repeat, dozing, or reading aloud to Raffa to keep him entertained while driving. I was feeling okay on the whole, but the strange distension of my stomach and an almost complete loss of appetite had me worried.

The night finished with a zebra/ostrich/alligator/oryx meat dinner, and we all fell asleep laughing.

It was around four am when I awoke Sunday morning. I was still half asleep when I suddenly realized that my bones felt larger than my skin, and I almost immediately began to shake violently. I was scared and confused, and yet didn’t want to overreact, so I lay quietly in the dark for a minute. However, my teeth soon began to chatter and I woke Daniel up with the noise and movement. He quickly put a palm to my forehead and told me I was burning up, and grabbed a bottle of water to pour me small sips. For about twenty minutes I couldn’t get my body under control – everything kept twitching in frightful intervals as Daniel calmly urged me to slow my breathing. Eventually, right before our 5:10 alarm went off, my arms and legs relaxed into stillness and I lay in exhaustion.

Our bus back to Gaborone was due to leave at six, and although Daniel wisely suggested that we go to the Windhoek ER, I was too concerned about getting back to Botswana to really consider it. So, I popped one of Anna’s Tylenol tablets and we all piled into a cab.

We sat on a street curb in the dark for about a half an hour, waiting for our bus to arrive. When a small combi-like vehicle pulled up in front of us, Anna, Daniel, Seb and I all exchange looks of disbelief. Despite my numb haze, I was still shocked by the size of the “bus” and the number of people waiting to board. Yet, with the tickets already paid for and a conductor-esque female calling our names, we had no choice but to throw our bags into the trailer attachment and step on board.

The high-ceilinged combi was clean and new, and yet from the moment we sat down I began to feel anxious. If twelve people had been passengers, perhaps it would have been tolerable, but as twenty or more piled in, I found myself rammed up against a window, and Daniel’s legs could barely fit into the space next to me. Even as all the seats filled up, more people took their places, standing in spaces that cannot be called aisles (Seb and Anna were plagued with the claustrophobic presence of a constant, looming shadow.) The women from the bus company and most of the passengers were all conversing in Setswana, so I couldn’t tell if there was reason for the crowding or the small car. Around six am, we hit the road.

Within about a minute of departure, my head was already rolling in half sleep. Yet the peace wouldn’t last for long, as a man sandwiched in the partitioned front of the combi cleared his throat and began to speak in grandiloquent rapture. “Praise Jesus Christ!” he yelled, and in the early dawn, the majority of our fellow passengers began to shout back at him. “Tell us Reverend!” a man in the back yelled, raising his hands and eliciting “amens” from the women in front of me. And the Reverend told him. He blessed our voyage at the top of his lungs, and then made a small movement that would be the start of a test of sanity. At the close of his abridged sermon, he leaned forward to turn on the cd player. Like a stampede of elephants, sound roared out of the speakers, blasting holes into my dazed mind and sending my eardrums into a fit of panic. For eleven straight hours, gospel music would blare, penetrating the deepest, most sacred parts of my brain and devastating my psyche. This tacky musical crusade was intrusive and offensive, but would prove to be only the outer layer of pain that would mark our journey.

Perhaps six hours into the morning’s heat, I began to feel a strange sort of stabbing in my right side. With each bump that we hit along the endless, impossibly dry road through the Kalahari, a terrifying pulse would ripple out in concentric circles from its abdominal origin. I’d spoken lightly with Daniel of appendicitis when we’d stopped earlier at the Namibian border crossing, but the symptoms he’d described didn’t seem to match. Now, as I sat there, confined to a rigid, upright state of mind and matter, my thoughts began to spiral into the vortex of medical maladies.

Hours passed, and I began to dissolve into a sort of whimpering delirium. The blank, sickly, never-ending expanse of bleached earth that flicked past the windows was poisonous and infectious, withering my mind to the brittle skeleton of a dying plant. I couldn’t read, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do much of anything except pray for the next fourfivesix? hours to pass in unconsciousness. At random moments, the combi would slow to swerve around herds of cows or goats obstructing our path, and as the wheels crunched stones, a vicious sort of panic would overwhelm me. We had to keep moving.

The only thing that truly kept me from crumbling was the constant, firm grasp of Daniel’s hand in mine. With a huge jug of water on the floor between us, each time I moaned a frightened request for help, he’d lift the jug up to my lips and help pour some water down my throat. He asked the bus company woman a few times about clinics on the way, but as each dusty town approached, our fear of unsanitary conditions and improper care would rise and loom. We let all the clinics pass. At one infrequent rest stop, an elderly American duo realized that they had cell phone reception again. After Daniel explained to the woman what was happening, she immediately began calling some doctors that she knew in Gaborone. Speaking on the phone and pressing my stomach, she attempted a mini diagnosis, but nothing was remotely conclusive. She offered me a small pill that she usually takes for stomach cramps, and I swallowed it numbly.

In the final hours of our hellish voyage, I dissolved into a state that verged on insanity. Each minute seemed a demon in itself, and no matter how I attempted to shift my body – a centimeter this way, another over there – my distended stomach and constant pain were impossibly present. The sun was sinking lower overhead, but the harsh heat of the air that rushed through the half-open windows remained a choking dry. With no phone and no watch, I had no sense of time or space, and when Daniel softly intoned the mantra “only a half hour more,” I was desperate to believe him. What I hoped were minutes ended up being close to two hours, and when we finally reached a section of Gaborone that I recognized, I was near complete panic.

As we pulled to a stop in a corner of the bus rank, people flooded out into the freedom of open space. The world was spinning around me and my legs felt non-existent as I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, falling into a collapsed sort of jumble. Seb, Anna, Raffa, and Helge, who had been separated from us during the ride, quickly grabbed Daniel and my bags, voicing concern and foisting over pula to help pay for a cab to the ER. Within seconds, Daniel had me by the hand and was guiding me through the bustling crowd of Batswana vendors, passengers, and cab drivers. My hair was wild and my clothes disheveled, and I could feel people staring at me as we passed.

The Gaborone private hospital was not the third-world horror that I had so frequently imagined, but it wasn’t the haven of sterile, orderly, we’ll-handle-it care that I had prayed for, either. Daniel got me admitted in no time at all (a force of nature, he is) and the nnese began going through the motions. The pain in my side and my back had reached an impossible level, and I lay on the scratchy white paper of the examination table, squeezing Daniel’s hand and letting tears flow down the sides of my face. Blood was drawn and I was stuck with an IV that began pumping the most blessed sort of painkillers into my bloodstream. I began to breathe a little.

I could write forever about the next day and two nights, but I will save the details for another time. Anyone who has ever been in a hospital knows the panic of the unknown, the isolation of a bed, and the long hours of a dark night. Multiplying those discomforts and fears by the confusion of broken language, miscommunication, IV’s that nurses refuse to re-insert, and the ever-present knowledge that Botswana is plagued by one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, and you have my time in Gaborone.

The rays of sunlight that flooded my corner of the ward in those next 24 hours were the faces, smiles, and gifts of Anna, Seb, Daniel, and the UB crowd, and the constant knowledge that despite the situation, I was close to people that I loved and could depend upon, and who wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me.

On Tuesday morning, I was flown in an air ambulance to the Four Ways hospital in Johannesburg. Penn’s insurance provider for students abroad is International SOS, and it was thanks to their quick action and informed concern that I was transported so quickly. Daniel accompanied me into South Africa, and we settled in for what was to be another ten days in hospital.

The specialist’s prognosis was horrible and terrifying when I was first admitted (severe kidney infection, probable development of an abscess, likely permanent damage, potential need for surgery) but the comfort of being somewhere these things could be handled was good. There is more to say than can be said about the mental mountains of my experience there, but I can summarize in a few lines. The entirety of my time in Johannesburg was a long tunnel of blinding extremes, pure terror, depression, numbness, sadness, relief, love, happiness, hope, and everything in between. I was pricked with needles more times than I can count, and fed health through my veins, and I was extremely lucky that my body responded well to the broad-spectrum antibiotics that the doctors prescribed it. Surgery was avoided, but stability was not regained. After a week of sitting at my bedside for long hours, reading me National Geographic articles, walking my IV drip through stony courtyards, and turning my tears into laughter, Daniel flew back to Gaborone and my mom flew to South Africa. Two days later the doctor told me that I had to return to the US.

What happened in that blur? IV’s were removed, phone calls were made, one pain faded and one pain struck. The minutes seemed to pass at a dizzying sort of distance, and I became obsessed with the thought of everything that was being ripped away from me. I never would get to say goodbye to the kids at Kamogelo, my roommates at UB, my professors, my friends. I would never walk to River Walk, dance at Fashion, fall asleep at Mexyland, or bake another batch of bagels. The mundane to the massive ran through my head in an endless reel of sadness and if you would have told me that I was back in the states already, I would have believed you.

Daniel packed up my life and flew back to Joburg on Friday. I got to spend a few last bittersweet hours with him, before we all returned to the airport and I said the hardest goodbye of my life. D flew back to Gaborone at 6:30, and my mother and I left for Paris at midnight. Over thirty hours in transit and I was back in Philadelphia.

To be back is to be between worlds, between continents, bobbing somewhere midway in the Atlantic, drifting slowly in ambivalence – a little bit this way, a little bit that way, always ending up with no net movement at all. It is the happiest sort of sad, and the saddest sort of happy – to know that I am safe and sound and that my body can work is a blessing of enormous size. But it is also a nagging cockroach that crawls through my mind, scurrying out in the dark to wriggle its legs in a pattern that says “so if you’re okay, why aren’t you in Africa?”

For the past ten nights I have lain awake in a painful sort of insomnia, watching life back in Gabs from my pillow perspective. I fast-forward ahead six hours, into the dark of the graduate village courtyard, and walk quietly beneath the windows of the people I love. I retrace corners of my own tiny dorm room, open cabinets to examine my treasured pots and pans, my spices, my plates, and readjust my eyes to the exact yellow dim of my old desk light. And if my consciousness begins to slip in the midst of crafting these delicate mental dioramas, I am awakened instantly by a panicked need to maintain hold of the city recreated in my head. It feels as though to stop imagining would be to let it go again.

I have missed these North-Eastern trees, the crisp cold of an October dawn, the grass on my lawn, and a million other things and people on this side of the Atlantic. However, I wasn’t ready to return to them, and I can’t bring myself to accept that I’m here. Each day in Gabs, no matter how challenging, frustrating, overwhelming, or hot, was a part of something that I knew was immense and beautiful. To have months ripped away from me in a single sentence was to lose the potential of those days, the content of which I had imagined and re-imagined a thousand and one times. Grand plans for travel and events, questions, friends, feelings, experiences – everything was suddenly gone.

One of the things that plagues me the most is knowing that I never got to say goodbye to the children at Kamogelo. A thousand times a day, their faces flick by on the slideshow in my mind, and I can feel their small hands in mine. I knew that I was going to have to leave them eventually, that I would go back to a life of luxury and safety and that they would remain as they were, exposed to conditions that they can’t yet fathom. And yet, I was hoping for something I guess, some closure, some way to explain what was happening and why.

Things will be okay, I know they will. I am blessed with life and health and love and memories, and the always beautiful prospect of days ahead. I am determined to make the best of the time I have now, to digest and reflect and speed up time into a full recovery. I still hold out hope for returning to Africa in December to travel with Daniel and Seb (it’s hard to let go of those Mozambique beaches and the magic of that travel companionship) but maybe that’s unrealistic. No matter, what happened didn’t seem too real itself, so I won’t rule out anything yet.

At the end of all this, and the beginning of everything else, perhaps the best part of the unimaginable is that as soon as it happens upon you, the world inevitably unfolds into a new and larger place. The people, the places, the events that I couldn’t have dreamed up five months ago, now reside in my head to be turned over at leisure. Despite the sad pain of all I'm missing and miss, I’m happy to know that there’s still a lot more exploring ahead.