"Home"

I’ve never been very good at change. If I have enough time to prepare, I can handle it, but if something big happens quickly, my brain reels and I feel like the world around me is spinning in one direction and I’m being violently flung in another.  Even when I have time to prepare, the moments leading up to the actual event toss me into a blender of emotions and fears.  Right now I’m in the blender, looking like a delightful smoothie but feeling like I’m being torn in to a million pieces that just don’t seem to fit.

Let me explain…and let’s just move away from the metaphors because obviously I could go for days and they don’t shine all that much light on the situation.

My parents are leaving Africa this week.  Moving.  Packing.  Shipping.  Closing that door.  In a few days, their home will no longer be on the continent that has always held my heart.

My first memories were in Rwanda, playing with my brother on the hill that was and always be the first place I remember as home.

When we lived in the United States in elementary school, going “home” to East Africa was always on my mind and in my heart.  I knew that it would happen eventually.

And it did when we moved to Ethiopia, which was new and exciting and different, but familiar and perfect and everything I hoped it would be.

Then there was boarding school in Kenya, with Ethiopia mixed in every three months.  It solidified even more strongly my roots and the depth of my love for the continent that greeted me with bird songs each morning and sunsets each night.

In college I knew that the smell of Ethiopian coffee would greet me when I put the suitcases in the car every time I picked my parents up from the airport.

And even now, living in China, my apartment is filled with items that come from the past sixteen years of calling Addis Ababa home.  The smell of the dusty streets still seems to greet me some mornings when I wake up from a dream of the land of “13 months of sunshine” and the birthplace of my beloved buna.

But they’re moving.

And while it will always be one of my “homes,” I’m not sure that I’ll be able to call it “home” anymore.  I won’t have a room with my old books from middle school sitting on the shelves.  Nijoro and Dixie won’t be in the yard when we pull in from the airport.  That street corner where the bus dropped me off in high school won’t be the street that we live on anymore.  The memories will always be there, but there is something so different about not having a bed that I’ve slept in before waiting for me after a long flight.

I don’t know how to process it.

I don’t know how to cope.

I just know that life is never quite going to be the same.

And the crazy thing is, China is home now.  It is home.  I feel at home on my couch in my living room in my 27^th floor apartment in a city of 14 million.  The sounds of the city are comforting to me here.  I am comfortable and love it and wouldn’t change a thing.  But the thought of losing one of my other homes is a weight that I just don’t know how to bear.

Does all of this change me? Not really.  But somewhere, deep down, I think I’m afraid that it might.

Oh the joys of being a TCK…which this time I’m going to let mean Totally Confused Kid.

I’ll be okay…life will go on.  The sun will keep on rising and setting…it always does.