Winter had come and along with its ferocious winds and mountains of ice it had brought a terrible darkness which felt like it had seized my heart and stuffed it inside a brooding closet.

 Darkness was like a thief to me, it stole my wings and as a dreamer I am nothing if I cannot fly.

 I knew this winter seemed abnormally depressing because I hadn’t experienced the season for nearly three years.  Where is the sun? I wanted to know! How does anyone function without it?!?!?!

 I had gotten so use to Africa’s fiery ball of orange and yellow electrifying my every move that I was like a junky, feeling nervous and paranoid, without my energy fix.  I wanted to take a magnifying glass to the shadows and see what was lurking inside them.  Was it depression? Was it some ill and twisted fate waiting to pounce on me? 

 No, Shan. It’s just winter. It’s supposed to get dark.

 I had to keep reminding myself of this, but in truth it was a lie because it wasn’t just the winter that was causing my soul to jerk like a Mexican jumping bean in the night, I was missing my students, my apartment on Urine Alley,  my Sudan.

 I had been in such a damn hurry to leave it on June 20^th that I had gone without even looking back, actually I remember having to make a very conscious effort to not look back because it was too much in that painfully dramatic moment, to acknowledge that deep inside my emotions of steel my heart was sobbing for the loss of a friend I would never see again.

 Don’t look back Shan, don’t look back. 

 So I had kept my gaze locked on the seat in front of me and on my unclear and unsure future.   But I had to, because if my focus wavered, even just a bit, my love for Sudan would have crippled me, left me lost in a blur of tears and trying like a loon on the loose, to stuff its deserts of urine and slime and children of prostitutes and thieves, into the weeping embers of my heart.

 And now it was gone…

 Would I ever see it again?  Would I ever ride on the backseat of a beat up rickshaw, one with plastic hearts that dangled from the windshield with the words ‘BIN LADEN’ plastered on its rear end?  Would I ever here the cool accent of the Sudanese as they spit, rather harshly, the very difficult Arabic sound, ‘kh’, which took me months and months to master?

  If only I’d acted like a proper friend and given it a decent goodbye, if only I’d known how much I would miss it after it was gone, then I would have written Sudan a letter and stuffed it in a bottle, then thrown it into the Nile and on the inside a white crisp paper would read the words that were forever etched on my soul: 

Thank you for the laughter and tears.  Thank you for a healthier perspective.  Thank you for simplicity.  Thank you for calm. Thank you for direction.  Thank you for life.

 Sudan was, without a doubt, my first love.  It was the only thing that had managed to put a lasso around my wild and restless heart.  So was I destined to long for it in the way everyone longs their first love? Maybe…

 But just like a first love, however fantastic the fling, it was and is time to let go of that sweet and unforgettable moment that, however irreplaceable, will never be again.