People ask me sometimes whether I’m still homesick for South Africa. For a long, long time, I used to answer yes, even if it was with qualifiers. But that’s not true any more. I could ramble some more, but basically I’m happy to be here, in Canada, in Toronto. It feels like home here, now. South Africa doesn’t have that in the same way any more. It’s somewhere to visit someday, when I can afford it. I miss my family there terribly, the few I’ve stayed in contact with. The rest are strangers to me, I haven’t seen or heard much of anything from them in 12 years. My heart squeezes tight when I think about the smell of sunwarmed dust or the fijnbos after rain… and I’ll probably always get teary from missing the ocean there, sometimes my skin craves being in that water so hard it hurts. But I cannot contemplate ever living there again.
What I’m feeling cannot be described as homesickness. It’s nostalgia and a sort of physical body-memory of the place that makes me want to run my hands over the rocks, have the hot wind fill my lungs, taste salt air and eat warm grapes off the vine… to physically connect. I will always care. But it’s not emotionally home any more. And that is sort of bittersweet.
