The Ghost of a Former Self

Revisiting Tanzania should have been like coming home. And indeed, in some ways it was. I’ve spent more years of my life in that beautiful country than anywhere else on earth. However, after seven years apart from it, I have changed significantly (I am now an adult, for one thing), and so has my beloved home. So instead of sliding mould-like back into the construct of my Tanzanian life, I found instead that I was an outside observer – a new self, tracing the trails of, and hunting the ghost of a former self.

Memory is a sloppy record-keeper. Places are remembered larger, and the distances between them shorter. Some details are ignored, while others figure so prominently in a memory that the subject becomes trivially reduced to an inane caricature. Smells have such strong associations; why is that? Mercifully, there are also some memories that are spot on.

I think it was important to go back – to become re-acquainted with my childhood self and, this time, to know it more fully. There is some closure in this exercise. There is the realization that the former and current selves are both fully “me”, and yet paradoxically distinct. Such a realization inevitably diverts my backward-staring gaze, and turns it to the future: who will the next “me” be?