I started to feel like a lighthouse a few years out of university. Friends and non-friends would come home after being out of touch with just about everyone they used to know for three, four, five years maybe.
Why come to me? Because, they said, they knew I'd always be here. And if I was here, then there was some chance I knew how to find people they were looking for.
Because the country isn't big. Everyone still knows everyone. It matters little if I've been living under a rock, surely I remember Jill who was Joe's girlfriend (but he was always horning her with June). How could I not know Jill?
Lighthouses don't move, they guide vessels safely in. And then the vessels figure, since you were here all along with nothing else to do, you must be keeping track of everyone's comings and goings.
See, now you think someone is in the lighthouse. Be not carried away.
The thing happened a long time ago, but only recently did we talk about it. The thing was 1990's attempted coup and my friend Elle and I were talking about the things we understood about ourselves on the night of July 27, 1990. We were in sort of the same place: our living rooms, in front of the TV. We were almost the same age, separated by only two weeks.
Elle knew then that she didn't want to live in a place where she felt as unsafe as she did at that moment. I knew I'd never move to another country - not because I like some good insurrection from time to time, but because if something needed fixing here, then here is where I had to be.
Her leaving has given her a safer life in many ways. My staying has made no difference of even the smallest kind. All I have to show for it is the insistence on being here. To not give up on a place that seems to beg you to abandon it if you have a care for your sanity, earning-potential, family safety and a desire for fresh cream ice-cream.
Over the years since those thoughts formed in our developing minds, more and yet more people I love and long to keep close have left and found new homes. I've found myself in the curious position of being one of the last of my old group of friends to still live here. A group, an old family friend used to say, who looked like a junior UN assembly.
In those days, I looked around and saw the clannishness of other cliques and I was so grateful we'd somehow managed to be different. Even then, awkward(er) and miserable(er) as I still managed to feel, I thought my friends were the best of me.
Lighthouses - sometimes just fires on a hilltop - have been around since hundreds of years BC. What with some of the questions I've been asked, I might as well have been at there at the construction of those ancient sites (RIP old lighthouses). Since it's the only time anyone is going to mistake me for tall and slender, I have no fight with the Anu-equals-lighthouse business.
The real question is, why am I so attached to it? The truth is nothing more complicated than simple one stated earlier: I stayed.
So what? Apparently another 1.5 million people also stay, so w
