Things Remembered - Day 2 - The End of an Era

I’ve spent a lot of time on planes. There have been smooth flights and ones that required extra measures of prayer, ones that had exciting adventures on the other end and reminders of sorrow throughout.  Growing up overseas, flying was never anything all that special, just a reprieve between places or a vessel to move me from one life to the next.  Sometimes the next was something exciting.  Sometimes it was something daunting.  But it was always something.

One flight in particular stands out more than the rest.

It was July (or maybe early August) 2005.  I had just graduated from high school and my family had spent 10 days after my graduation in Rwanda, the land that held my first memories, first friendships, first crushes.  But I couldn’t fully engage in that trip to Rwanda because I was fully in the between.

Up to that point, half of my life had been spent in Africa.  9 of my 18 years I had been at home on a continent where my skin colour meant that I would never fully fit.  7 of those 9 years in one of my passport countries, the United States, had been spent longing for the day that we would return ‘home’ to Africa. When we wouldn’t fit, but would feel so much more comfortable.  Where my friends wouldn’t necessarily look or talk like me, but would be so much more familiar in our thought processes and our understandings of the world.

And I was leaving.  We boarded the plane in Nairobi, heading to Europe and then to the US, where college was on the horizon and the unknowns were piling up.  Would I have friends? Would I be understood?  Would I ever return? What career would I choose? So many who’s and what’s and when’s and where’s…all overwhelmed by a why that was beyond my control.

And so, we got on that plane at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

I know I had a window seat.  I don’t remember which family member was sitting next to me.  All I could see what was outside the window.  Africa…Kenya…one of my many homes.  But in that moment, it all blurred to be the continent that I was trying desperately not to let go of.

The plane pulled away from the gate, then taxied to the runway.  Usually that trip seems like it takes forever, but that time it didn’t take nearly long enough.  Suddenly, the engines sparked into action and the wheels pulled up from the runway.

And I looked through my window, back at the tarmac that we had just left.  I swear I could see my heart beating there are on the pavement, disconnected from the human that it had once inhabited.  My heart.  My African heart…it was ripped out of my chest and left beating in the marvelous dust of the continent that I called home.

I’ll never forget that moment.  That loss and sorrow and grief.

Life went on and eventually I started to feel whole again…but that moment is one that I can still close my eyes and see.

Oh the joys of Third Culture Kid living…