Homecoming.

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And so on a sunny Wednesday morning in Maputo, waking up for the last time in an apartment I’d only just begun to consider home, I’ve packed the last of my bags, washed the last of my dishes, polished off the leftovers, exchanged a few brisk farewells, sighed at a life that had seemed so full of promise, and hauled my things into the back of a cab for the start of a very long trip home. It’s hardly where I would’ve pictured my life heading just a few weeks ago. Ten days ago I was shopping for groceries and stocking the fridge; I was making plans for friends’ birthdays, imagining an endless string of Friday nights at Rua d’Arte, imagining beaches and dhow trips and lazy weekends swimming in an ocean the temperature of a child’s bath.

Now, after a frenzied week of preparations, a curious peace has set in. I’m standing outside the airport terminal, staring at the sunlit lawns, the pennants flapping in a warm breeze. It’s a glorious morning. There’s no time for sadness today, no emotional space for regrets and wonderings at what might have been. Duty, family life are calling me back to New York. It was a decision in little more than name: I have to go. There will be time in the weeks ahead to feel pangs of longing for the home I might have had, to dwell on the places I’ve missed, to make plans for a return trip that, I know, will be months or even years down the road.

The airport is a listless place, a long, dimly lit hall where the air is stiflingly hot. I’ve arrived terrifically early for my flight, and the few airline personnel who sit reclined in straight-back seats, heads lolling to the side, don’t seem inclined to check my luggage or lift a finger or even acknowledge my living, breathing presence at the check-in desk. I wheel my bags back and forth along the length of the terminal. I buy an ice cream sandwich that promptly melts and sticks to my fingertips. At the ticket counters and in the souvenir shops, bored looking attendants rest their heads on their arms, staring into the empty spaces. A young beggar enters the terminal, looking forlornly from side to side, before shuffling over and asking for change.

Voices crackle over the speakers. A confused rush of passengers. Disorder, largely jovial, as we board. In the congested aisles we stow our bags in overhead compartments and jockey for seats. We smoothly lift into the air and tilt so that the sun catches the wingtips. The cabin crew hand out lunch boxes fastened with a “Sealed In Freshness” sticker. Inside is a chocolate cookie and a chicken sandwich, each hermetically sealed against our germ-laden fingers. We chew and stare silently ahead, crinkling the wrappers between our fingertips. I’m going to have to adjust to the habit of sharing breathing space with someone for the better part of an hour without exchanging a single word. The TV screens drop and retract with ultra-modern, mechanical whirrs. Then we touch down in Johannesburg.

The airport is some 25 miles from the city proper. A shame. I was hoping to catch sight of that famous skyline - perhaps the only one worthy of the name in Africa - and to maybe feel a trace of the kinetic energy that powers this, the commercial engine of the continent’s only economic powerhouse. Instead we are shepherded from the plane to the swift shuttle buses, and then again through the vast corridors of OR Tambo International Airport, past the thin polite smiles of ticket agents and the fussily thorough immigration officials, who want to know my departure and my destination and the nature of my business during the 20 minutes it will take for me to haul ass to Gate 14.

The airport is a wonder. It is bright, modern, floodlit; it is stocked with cafés and bars and restaurants and shops and paunchy tourists set to return to their northern climes with reports of the rising star that is South Africa. There is something called an “express spa,” which seems as therapeutic as Drive-Thru Yoga. Everything is dazzling and marvelous. I would like to spend time here, getting to know this airport; like a pretty girl at a bar, I just want to sit and revel in its company for a while. But there’s little time to spare before my flight leaves for Dakar. I buy a sandwich and the latest issue of The Economist, fumbling with my fistfuls of rand - another funny, pastel-colored currency covered with scenes from Animal Planet. Then I’m bolting through those gaudy halls of commerce in search of the flight that will take me to the place I used to call home.

In the departure lounge I’m surrounded by more Americans than I’ve seen in years: fat, brash, full of the raucous humor that precedes a full day in confined spaces. Many are already gilding their safari tales for eager audiences in Omaha, Des Moines, Tucson, and the Portlands. Two college girls are having a very vocal spat that, I suspect, has carried over from some slight in the Kruger Park or Cape Town. A friend’s plan to “go take a pee” is loudly broadcast, as if for our approval. People seem to be complaining, often, about everything.

A tall airline staffer, a black South African, is orchestrating the controlled chaos that precedes our security pat-downs. He has marshaled us into two lines, one for women, one for men. There is some confusion as to the why’s and wherefores’s of this procedure, and he brushes these concerns aside in a manner that is both polite and patronizing. He is a marvel to behold. As I approach I hear him greeting each ruddy newcomer in what I take to be Zulu. Everyone smiles dumbly, tilts their head with benign condescension. How African he sounds! On his part I detect a thinly disguised malice. We have come to his country, flush with foreign currencies, we have spent a year’s worth of African salary for a few days of sundowners and safaris, and not one of us can so much as greet him in the tongue of his people. I want to protest. I’ve just come from Mozambique! I just got here an hour ago! I would be happy to exchange a few words in Kiswahili or Kinyarwanda or Chichewa. I’m not like the others! No dice. He smiles cruelly and waves me through.

Then I am on another plane, fastening another seatbelt, struggling to make small talk with another neighbor. We’ll be sharing the next 18 hours of our lives, and I figure it’s worth the effort. She is pretty, blonde, South African. She is flying to New York, then to Aruba, where she begins work as a masseuse aboard a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship at the end of the week. I have polite things to say about Norwegian: as a veteran of a single Carnival cruise - my brother’s ill-fated wedding-at-sea of 2005 - and a man familiar with the pedigrees of the major cruise lines, I know that Norwegian is a cut above some of its more pedestrian competitors. The approval of a complete stranger somehow reassures her. She is nervous about a fresh start aboard a fresh ship - she’s worked for other companies in the past - and there will be little time for her to get acclimated to the Norwegian Cruise Lines’ hierarchies and social strata, the complicated group dynamics of a workplace sailing the high seas, before her fingers are working the kinks from the neck fat of some Texas oil baron off the coast of Grenadine. I am sympathetic. I would like to comfort her during the long hours ahead, but her conversation is reserved. We stick to safe ground: airline food, legroom. I gesture to the ring on her finger and ask if she’s just gotten engaged. The ring, she notes, is on her right hand. I observe that toilets flush in opposite directions in each hemisphere, and that maybe engagement protocol, too, might be reversed. She smiles thinly, a straight line of lip. Then she fusses with her headphones, turns to her TV screen, and is lost for the rest of the night.

It’s around this time that I should begin to prepare my own thoughts, to tend to the emotions turning chaotic circles in my stomach. I do not. The air conditioner is thrumming and the lights are low and soft, and I decide, in the imagined intimacy of this pressurized cabin 30,000 feet above the earth, that I can put off my terrestrial cares a bit longer. There is too much to consider, too many hopes and fears to put into their proper places. This is no time for a great reckoning. I distract myself with movies, doze in fits and starts. When we touch down in Dakar, a cocoon of light envelops the runway; passengers disembark and board with their oversized carry-ons, trundling through the narrow aisles and peering at seat numbers. Something is being said by the pilot; the cabin crew is unreasonably perky. I drift off to sleep as we lift into the thin high air, shuttling through the darkness away from my African life.

You spend years cultivating an idea of yourself, you draw a mental image of how you’d like to be seen that, often, has no bearing on how the world actually sees you. I had visions of myself returning from Africa more accomplished, more worldly. My bylines would appear in periodicals of note, my name whispered reverently by doctoral students chain-smoking in downtown cafés. I would lean across a New York bar and make eye contact with pretty strangers and begin my sentences, always, “When I was in Damascus…,” “When I was in Kampala…,” “When I was in Mozambique…”.

It was a lot to expect from a couple of years’ travels.

I touch down at JFK with love handles and sun spots and coffee stains on my teeth. Another unheralded stranger, full of hopes and stories. They wave me through customs without a word. It’s good to be home.

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