Time After Time

They say you can’t travel thorough time, but I can and do all of the time, actually oftentimes moving forwards and backwards at once, my head spinning with thoughts on what has happened and what is about to occur. I engaged in this type of time warp in my old space, during my time in the fast-paced West where unlike here most people think of all times except the present, spending most of their time lagging in the past and accelerating into the future. And as I am just about to reenter that old space that mixes the former and the following, as I verge on breaking the time-space continuum, I find that I am no longer thinking of only the present here and now, which I have been doing for some time, for these many months; I am preparing as it were to leave this space and return to the future, and I find myself more and more of the time thinking of exactly that, moving back and forth.

Nearly a year has passed since I came to Uganda and nearly 10 months since I first met my beloved five children. It is impossible to really ascertain much less describe how much I have changed during that time, as well as how much the children have developed. I think back to the places we occupied before, me in a comfortable Western life complete with luxury cars and fancy flat screens and high speed internet and paved roads and quality medicine and quality food and quality everything and they in impoverished Third World existences of mud houses and unclean water and field labor and uneducated minds and poor nutrition and poor medical treatment and poor everything , and how our lives crashed into wild convergence this last year and how our lives will swiftly diverge breaking apart again in just a few short weeks, in a time too soon happening.

Thinking back to the children they were when we found them, sometimes I want to laugh. Rachel the first few months we had her took to opening and shutting doors in the Balaza’s home over and again, me realizing later that she engaged in this rather annoying habit because the kids’ home and those they visited in the village didn’t have doors, opening and closing a door was in fact for her an endlessly fascinating form of entertainment. And fast-forwarding to now, likewise the three youngest girls to this day insist on bathing at their jaaja’s (grandparents) because the house has a shower head, which still doesn’t yield hot water, but a shower head nonetheless, which the children stand under squealing and splashing, revealing in the novelty of (sort-of) modern plumbing.

Thinking back to the children they were, sometimes I want to cry. Despite knowing that their lives have altered drastically, the images of those five desperate faces in the village that me, Ester, Aunt Vinnie and Sumete first found last June still haunt my mind, the past lingering into the present pressing ominously against the future. I see those faces again in my memory, in recalling what was, and am reminded of them, and what still is, at times when I turn on the TV, floating before my eyes again in the aftermath of earthquakes and famines, floods and wars, tiny faces that are at once tense and apathetic, shocked and hopeless, ruined from the past, tortured in the present, uncertain of the future; I knew those faces before, didn’t understand them until now, and will commiserate them forever going forward: those are the young faces of trauma.

And in thinking ahead, imagining the lives we will lead, me and my children, sometimes I am excited; for me to be back in the comforts of modern society and the like-minded, to be clean and understood, to be healthy and heard, to eat well and to be anonymous, for that I am anxious; and for them to continue their lives with the comforts that Africa can at the very least offer: regular food, clean water, educations, something that passes for health care and, most importantly, love.

And in thinking ahead, imaging the lives we will lead, me and my children, sometimes I am scared. Will I be able to catch the things that fade and fall through time and space? Will the children be forced back into their dark pasts if not for bright futures? What will remain when dreams and expectations, intentions and understandings are entangled in the circles of backwards and forwards in the gaps of here and there? I think back, I think ahead, my mind racing out of the past and into the future, who I was, who I will be, who they have been, who they will become; I consider, I dream, I hope, I wonder…time after time…

After my pictures fades

And darkness has turned to grey

Watching through windows

You’re wondering if I’m okay

Secrets stolen from deep inside

The drum beats out of time

If you’re lost

You can look

And you will find me

Time after time

If you fall

I will catch you

I’ll be waiting

Time after time

Time after time

Time after time