Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Anniversary

It's been ten years, since that lonely day you left me...

That's a lyric from a Jason and the (Nashville) Scorchers line, from back when I cared a great deal about music, in my teens and twenties.

It continues to where the singer shoots his lover, and that has of course nothing to do with me, but that and the last line of the song runs through my head when I hear about the hurricane that hit New Orleans ten years ago.

That's the day Herr Marlboro came tearing into my apartment on the Ggaba Road, back from running errands in Kampala. "Did you hear about New Orleans?" He went straight to the television and put on BBC or CNN (I forget which we got there).

It's also the last vivid memory I have of when things were going well for us. Right after that, his family came to town from Bavaria. We all went to a dinner at an outdoor garden in an Italian restaurant, where I ate something that made me terribly ill. They left in the morning, before I got so sick. He took them off to Murchison Falls while I stayed in Kampala, going to doctors when I wasn't lying on the sofa watching repetitive coverage of Katrina. This is covered in the first chapter of Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik.

Everything went off the rails shortly after, and then we were chased by a hippo. I ended up leaving, getting far, far away in a hurry, and I got very ill in Swakopmund, Namibia.

You can read all about September of 2005 early in this blog. You have to read between the lines a bit, because my book about this time hasn't been written yet. I don't know that it ever will be. I'd like to write it, but it's hard to find the time. I used to not write it because it was hard to revisit. Now I can revisit it without upsetting myself, but time is at a premium.

Everything changed for me in September of 2005, and that's okay. People do change, you know. But I migrated into a zone of a long state of depression, which only responsibility for a dozen employees in Cairo was able to pull me out of, a few years later. What really changed from this time is my outlook, and my inability to trust others. I do sort of, sometimes, I guess, but essentially, at some point in handling all this myself, I become my own mini-kitchen, a self-sufficient package of competency. It's morphed into a zone of familiarity and comfort. It's fine. I know other people have different ways of living, usually involving their own definitions of fun and happiness. This is what works for me, and I don't fight it anymore. It's kind of great, in its own way.

Pray for me, mama. I'm a gypsy now. 


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good, very good, ya fierce gypsy sistah. Nod