Back to the Motherland
Travelling home to Africa to visit family
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The airport smells the same every time. Not bad, just familiar — a mix of cleaning products, coffee, and the particular kind of anxiety that fills departure halls at five in the morning. I drag my suitcase through the crowd and find my seat at the gate, still half asleep, still not quite believing I am actually going.
It has been three years. Three years since I last saw my grandmother's face, not on a screen, but in real life — the deep lines around her eyes, the way she holds both your hands when she talks to you, as if she is afraid you might float away. Three years since I sat under the big mango tree in the compound and did absolutely nothing for an entire afternoon. In the city where I live now, doing nothing feels like a crime.
I check my phone again. The flight is on time. Six hours to Accra, then a smaller plane south, then a long car ride on roads that will make the car shake and rattle. My uncle will be waiting at the arrivals hall, probably with a handwritten sign even though I told him a hundred times that I know what he looks like.
The man next to me is eating a sandwich at five-fifteen in the morning. I find this deeply strange but also admirable. I have a coffee I am not really drinking and a book I am not really reading. My mind is already somewhere else — in a kitchen that smells of groundnut soup, in a yard where chickens walk freely and nobody thinks this is unusual.
When the plane finally takes off, I feel something shift inside me. It is hard to describe. Like a drawer sliding shut. Everything I have been carrying — the deadlines, the cold weather, the feeling of being slightly out of place all the time — it all becomes smaller as the ground disappears below.
I sleep for most of the flight. When I wake up, the sky outside the window is turning orange and pink, and the pilot is saying something about our descent. I press my face against the cold plastic of the window like a child.
And there it is. Red earth. Green trees so thick they look like a carpet. Roads that wind like rivers. And the light — that specific gold and copper light that exists nowhere else in the world, at least not for me.
My uncle is waiting. He is holding a sign. It says my name in enormous letters, decorated with small stars drawn in blue pen. I laugh so hard I almost drop my bags.
'Three years!' he says, pulling me into a hug that lifts me off the ground. 'You are too thin. Don't worry, your grandmother has been cooking since Tuesday.'
Three years. And just like that, it feels like three days.