Just over ten days to go before I fly back home and I really don’t want to leave. I feel so at home here, with my young, in the heat of certain sunshine, the warmth of African welcomes, all the new people I have met, talked, and laughed with over delicious meals beneath jacaranda boughs all festooned with twinkly lights. I have risen with the sun and sat beside the pool as day gives way to night, a glass of good wine beside me and my skin covered in anti-mosquito spray. I won’t miss them, the mosquitos, silent and determined and always under the table. I have helped with many small tasks and a few big ones, as my young prepare to move house, sanding, oiling, stripping tables, painting walls, and occasionally cooking the evening meal. I have walked in the wildlife estate, thrown ball for the big soft dog in a dog park, laughed at the antics of many cats and shared worrying moments when they came. In short, I have engaged completely with every aspect of life in Africa and the buzz word here is companionship.

Since himself decided to abandon ship, I have felt very alone, even though, towards the end, he was mostly in his own world, I in mine. But he was a presence in the home, a familiar. Navigating the uncharted waters of early widowhood was uncomfortable at times, unsteady, rough too, but I did not capsize, not me. Friends and family are all anyone needs beyond the obvious, like an inside toilet, money for food and bills and four stone walls to surround and protect. Connecting, however, was strange at first. I would say all is well, I am fine, et la la, but inside I felt, at times bereft. I didn’t want himself back, not as he became, but the familiar, when removed in any life, will cause a disturbance in the atmosphere, a fractal cracking of a heart, yes, a split in the ground beneath feet, a stopping of the old turning wheel. Advancing can feel like an impossibility, but very gradually, all this stopping and cracking becomes irritating. The human spirit is tenacious, the inner sprite knows how to itch from within, like a mosquito bite. Now I notice my skin, now I see the red rise of response, now I need to do something, find someone, get off the couch, get living again.

We all take our own time inside this process. There are no rules, no timelines, even if those who have not experienced a fractal cracking decide there are both. Meaning well, but unknowingly feeding the inner judge, these good folk encourage. Get out more, join a club, take up tango, anything to create motion and connection, they might say and to it all I said No thanks. Although I understood that there is a thin line, blue I think, between natural grieving and indulgent collapse, something in me just knew it would take me the time it took me, that eventually my fed would be right up there and I would, naturally, lift myself into a new life. And this I have done. Africa is a healing place for me, mosquitos notwithstanding, and I will miss the soothing balm of easy family companionship. However, and there is always one of those, the flip side of the coin, the other face of the moon etc, is that I have had a long time here. I have inhabited each day and still do. I have engaged with small and ordinary tasks, ready for adventure even if it is just a shopping trip for food, and this because of the surprisingly wonderful serendipities that might just appear in conversation. Familiarity can allow openness, the freedom of precious sharing, whispers from deep in a soul, voiced and floating, beautiful and fragile as butterflies. A new encounter perhaps, a random meet in a shop, smiles swapped, news exchanged that ripple out in a mind for the rest of the day.

I love to live alone, now, but I also know the power and the value of companionship. I will fly back to my much loved island home with a wealth of memories to nourish me. I will recall flash moments and long conversations, reflect on how my time here has affected my young and myself, how we all might feel encouraged to move forward in something previously stuck on ‘hesitate’. Perhaps we have discovered a reset of values, of beliefs, of perception and will, over time, absorb that learning into our lives. Distance is just a plane journey and distance cannot disconnect connection, not in minds, not in spirit for we are linked in ways no force can sever. We change and grow, learn and discover, share and develop because of each other, all of the each others in our lives. Each day offers a gift, the chance to learn something beyond the familiar, something unexplainable, silent, invisible and flowing with light and lift.

I am thankful for each moment left to me in this place, looking forward to what may happen after breakfast, and extremely happy that mosquitos don’t fly in sunshine, whereas I, most certainly, do.