Alone Time

At first living alone seemed like bliss. Kinda. I'd just finished training only to discover that my house wasn't ready so I went from a host family to living with another volunteer. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was overwhelming. Then I moved into my house. It was winter and I'd only been on malaria meds for 3 months. I was jittery and paranoid. My dreams were like real life and so were my nightmares but on Friday or Saturday nights I used to put on my patent leather pumps, fake eyelashes, and wear red lipstick. I would think about how I should be out wearing an expensive pair of jeans. I would think that I should be wearing a skimpy top with no bra and in my right hand should be a mojito. In America it was summertime. In Botswana it was the dead stone of winter.
After a year, a good night was a hot cup of coffee and walking on my borrowed carpet with Simon (the cat) following behind me twitching his tail back and forth. I'd close the curtains and wear an old LMU sweatshirt with the pajama pants Craig left behind last December and I would watch movies on a laptop. I can now admit to myself that moving pictures on a screen eventually get boring; it’s then that I'd retreat to a book but one particular time I watched a movie called Synecdoche. I couldn’t help but appreciate the title since it’s got a double meaning. In the movie it refers to a city in New York, but in literature the word synecdoche refers to the act of using a part to represent the whole (for example, the phrase lend me your ears, or sit your ass down), At the very beginning a professor of literature reads a poem about the onset of autumn--a melancholy season that signifies the beginning of the end. She reads a poem that goes thus:

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone, will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters to the evening
And wander the boulevards up and down restlessly while the dry leaves are blowing. (Rilke)

I'd sit alone, read and write long letters to the evening and call them blogs, or I would date them and call the journal entries. Batswana (and Africans in general, I think) wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to be alone. When the shit hits the fan Batswana always have someone who comes through for them--a flock of people: family, friends, neighbors that never particularly liked them b/c their dog killed three of his/her chickens. Everyone. In their darkest hour a Motswana is never alone. If they are its a disgrace and they've been shunned. I can't think of anything they could possibly do that would earn that kind of punishment. I however begged for solitude and alone time until I got wise. Living alone is great for a while but solitude is just a border post. Its the invisible line where Overwhelmed and Lonely meet. Like the literature professor said: whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters and wander the boulevards of her mind restlessly while the dry leaves of shriveled opportunities and the shrapnel of broken promises are blowing.
And so I stopped walking barefoot on the borrowed carpet with my cat. In Botswana you don't necessarily have to do anything labor intensive to keep company with people. Not in modern day Botswana at least. I learned that I should spend my weekday nights going to my neighbor Neo's house to watch Soapies. The moving pictures on the screen never get boring and by the sheer art of sitting, my Setswana has improved two fold. By doing nothing together I've learned to stir phaleche like a real Motswana. I can cook madombi. Together Neo, Tebogo, and I sit on the red velveteen couch and watch a South African soap opera called Generations while eating meat and phaleche--we are the only vegetables, sitting; watching; being together because no man is an island and Botswana is land locked anyway.