Fragments of leaving

A week (to the hour) before my flight from Lusaka, I came home to a broken back door lock.

“Just to let you know, one of our locks needs to be replaced.” I texted my housemates, and then paused. “Oh s***. we might’ve been broken into.”

I walked into my room and everything was in disarray: my clothes heaped in a pile, my suitcases jammed open, the contents of every little box and bag strewn over the floor. My old laptop was gone and I didn’t know what else. Thankfully, everything I needed for work and life – passport, phone, work laptop – I’d had on me. I was tired.

I stumbled to the neighbours’ in my socks. They were more indignant than me about the break-in. One of my friends also got broken into that day, posted on about how much it hurt. Another started sleeping with a pickaxe. Over the next few days, people told me how it must’ve been awful for that to happen, now. I made jokes about it and people said they were impressed by how well I was coping. But I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything.

***

Leaving is difficult business.

This September, after a few months of 80-hour workweeks, I took a bus back to Lusaka from the provinces. There was a horror movie playing the whole time, and afterwards I took a minibus home, sitting jammed between the door and a small child and my suitcase. I walked through the dust up the hill to my house, balancing my suitcase on the shallow storm drain.

I showered and fell asleep and when I woke up, I realised half my friends had left Lusaka.

“We’ve lived five lives here already,” I told my friend the last evening we spent together (three months later, a year after she’d moved here). She understood; I didn’t even have to explain. Such is the life of a perpetual foreigner, I guess.

 ***

I went to church once in Lusaka, and maybe should’ve gone back. The sermon was about home break-ins, how a focus on individual sins (like theft) allows us to ignore communal sins (like perpetuating inequality that leads to theft). I liked to think and even said, over the next few days, that Zambia’s inequality was why it didn’t bother me (“Sure, they might’ve needed it more than you,” one of my friends responded to my sanctimony, “but there still has to be rule of law!”).

But really? I was just exhausted.

***

Three weeks before I left, my friend and I were sitting on a wall by the lake at midnight as the bonfire faded.

“You know,” she said, “you get along with all types of people.” It was languid, like we hadn’t just met a few weeks ago, like we’d all the time in the world.

Unfortunately, that was when I saw a massive dark shape approaching the beach. Why, I thought, is that dog the size of a truck? Another terrifying truck-sized animal appeared. I began to scream.

Afterwards, we took whiskey shots out of mugs. We woke up in a castle, to the wind blowing the curtains half-open and the sound of falling rain.

***

Once, a boy and a girl met at sunset to look at some crocodiles. They talked until dawn.

(Maybe the crocodiles did, too).

***

The morning I left, we drank tea and discussed New Year’s resolutions. I only have one.

When I arrived in Lusaka, I treated it like a short-term stay: two years, and then I’m out, back to the US. (I didn’t stay in Lusaka two years, and I didn’t go back to the US, either).

The next place I go, and every place after that, I’m resolving to have a better mindset. Maybe I’ll stay longer than my contract, or maybe I’ll leave, if like this time, an opportunity comes up. Maybe the deciding factor will be my professional life, because I’ve let myself care about my work; maybe it’ll be my personal life, because I’ve let myself care about people, finally listened to what wiser ones have told me over and over and over. Maybe it’ll be the place. Everyone says the food is to die for, and there might be monkeys, but no hippos.

I hope it means that next time I move, I’ll end up a bit less tired.

***

The break-in expedited my packing by a few days. It was better to feel like all my stuff was on the floor because I’d put it there.