The Long Tail of an Apology
on the seed “what still trails behind you?”
I owe someone an apology from the autumn of 2004. I have written it perhaps a thousand times, and sent it none.
read itNairobiguest spot
A small wrong just follows at a polite distance, year after year, waiting to be looked at.
I spent two decades in London newsrooms and came home to Nairobi to recover the things a career had crowded out. I write early, in the language my mother taught me, about return, inheritance, and the long way round. This is my first season with seeds & shoots.
I owe someone an apology from the autumn of 2004. I have written it perhaps a thousand times, and sent it none.
read itPeople ask how I ended up back in Nairobi after twenty years, and I usually give them the tidy version. All true. None of it the reason.
read itThe tide comes back to the same rocks whether or not anyone is watching. I do too: to my mother’s kitchen, to a language I stopped speaking, to the version of me that had not left yet.
where do you keep returning?Strip away the title, the city, the calendar. What was left had been standing there the whole time, patient as a bare tree holding the last of the light.
who are you without it?