The difficult part about calling a fast-paced city your home while not living there is that the she tries to distance herself from you every time you leave. Upon return I’m not greeted with a warm hug or a kiss on the cheek. Not even a, hey how you been? Instead, she’s dyed her hair, gotten a new tattoo and is sporting a hip pair of sunglasses. I can’t even tell if she’s looking at me.

In “Out of Africa” Isak Dinesen describes leaving Kenya as a tide going back into sea. But the tide is not the author herself but the country. “As I stood and looked at them a fancy came back to me that had taken hold of me before: It was not I who was going away. I did not have it in my power to leave Africa, but it was the country that was slowly and gravely withdrawing from me, like the sea in ebb-tide.”

I walked down Skidori shopping street towards the station. The arcade where the young attendant would give us free credits if we came early enough, was now a drugstore. The toyshop with the friendly lady and the 3 cats was now a Mos Burger. The old hardware store whose owner taught us how to fry yakitori, was now a takeout bento shop. “I really should have taken pictures of those old shops,” I tell my dad. “I don’t even remember what this used to be.“ However, that conversation inevitably ends with the hollow feeling of telling yourself you missed your chance while knowing, instinctively, that to capture change you need only begin recording now.

It’s at that moment that I turn a small corner at the grocer, walk down a side street and see it. She gasps and tries to stop me but its too late. I’ve walked into her room and that poster I gave her is still on the wall. She never took it down because, well, she never thought I would see it. It was small but it was something. It was, in fact, all that I needed. And I look at her as she turns her head in embarrassment. “Im sorry,” I say.

“Till then I had been a part of it, and the drought had been to me like a fever, and the flowering of the plain like a new frock. Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see it clearly and as a whole.” - Isak Dinesen