The Dust Roads of Yesterday

“I travel back. Back through the veils of years, chasing ghosts in the golden haze of an East African afternoon. Back to lost memories scattered like acacia seeds across the savannah, to dreams as bright and fragile as a sunbird’s wing, shattered against the windshield of reality. I see them – the child gaping at Kilimanjaro’s snowy crown from a rattling matatu, the teenager trembling with illicit joy at their first clandestine bus ride to Mombasa, heart pounding louder than the diesel engine. That innocence… it feels like a place on the map I can no longer find, erased by the tears I’ve known, salty as the Indian Ocean spray.”