I found some relief in seeing my present state mirrored in the experiences of another. But this relief was, I knew, only a balm. To heal, I would need to look inward as well as outward. I would need to examine my memories. I would need to interrogate the stories I told myself—about myself, about my family, about the world. My unsolved questions were about my mothers and my father. They were about loss, longing, and fear; about my abandonment. They were about my upended, dislocated body and mind. They were about the geography and geology of my experience— about who I was and how I’d ended up in the blue chair. They were about finding my way out of it. But they were also about the borders and boundaries and fault lines on which we all live. They were about fractured surfaces and tectonic forces; about energies unleashed. This, I knew, was a reckoning. God of fire help me, I begged, or if you cannot help me, then show me how to set my world ablaze.

I don’t think this place was everything my mother hoped for that day when she asked God where she should go to give her son the world. Though she didn’t ford a river or hike across mountains, she still did what so many pioneers before her had done, travelled recklessly, curiously, into the unknown of hopes of finding something just a little bit better. And like them she suffered and she persevered, perhaps in equal measure. Whenever I looked at her, a castaway on the island of my queen-sized bed, it was hard for me to look past the suffering. It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost - her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered., but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us.

It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding rows, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, at the nature of ‘what we can handle’ changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.

PART TWO: Chapter 10: The Wilderness Years: Exile

“Nevertheless, the feeling that my parents had a greater mission that took priority over me became the dominant narrative in my mind, pushing out the many ways in which my mum and dad tried to be present and available. I edited out so many of the ways in which they showed up for me and loved me, my own bias shaping the story I told myself for years.

Writing this book has required me to both collect and re-examine all of the evidence at my disposal, not just that which is most easily accessible in my head. The realisation that I had erased so much of their efforts is hard to sit with.

Chapter 12: Changing Tides: A Girl at Dea

“For days my mother’s fragrance lingered on the landing that ran between my parents room and mine. There were no windows there, just a bulb overhead, but it is the one part of the house where I remember there being light.

Chapter 13: Homecoming: The Return

“It is hard to explain what it is like to go from feeling different from everyone around you to feeling so connected to everyone in your world. In England, my parents and I had been alone, like limbs detached from their body. In South Africa, I caught glimpses of myself in the way my aunts and cousins laughed or moved their hands, as if I was looking into little mirrors on a beautiful embroidered cloth. But it was with Fumane that I saw my fullest reflection. I don't mean in the physical sense, although we have the same cheekbones and generous lips. It was in the way I could feel her emotions by just looking into her eyes, like we were made from the same material, the same cloth. We were cut to slightly different patterns, but the fabric of us responded the same way to heat, light, movement and life. I had never met anyone like that before.