Karmen Wiid

It’s lush on the farm this time of year, balmy. Early summer means thick rainstorms rolling in from the Wallmansthal township, bright mornings turning wet and stormy well before my third cup of coffee. 

That’s when the dogs climb deep into their wooden shelters, piling on top of each other, watching the rain fall with drooping ears and sad toddler eyes. Seeing them like this through the kitchen window reminds me of long afternoons watching Lady & The Tramp on my parents’ bedroom floor, eating spaghetti and slurping rooibos tea.

My grandma used to dip thick slices of brown bread with marmite in her rooibos tea, the salt mixing with the sweet. My grandfather chuckling at her. My grandfather who died eight months ago. I still see him walking around the garden when dusk softens sight and logic. 

So many memories playing tag, one chasing the other, darting around before my eyes. I still know exactly where the light will fall at 5 pm, and which trees cast the longest shadows. I know when it will rain by the smell of the earth, and what day of the week it is by the scents drifting from the kitchen. My body knows the threadbare warmth of old towels hung in the sun. It’s all still here, like it’s been waiting for me to remember.

The air here feels thick with time, green and soft heat, sunshine and the buzz of tiny living things. It’s another bright morning. The sound of birdsong, Sarah stirring oats pap in the kitchen, grass being mowed in the distance, the clickity-clack of my mother’s laptop.

Outside, sunlight pools in fat patches on the grass, like little buddhas in meditation, round and content, glowing with an amused kind of warmth. 

The shadows, for their part, feel luxurious.

It’s November in South Africa. I always think coming back will feel different, like too much time has passed, too much of me has changed. But it’s quite the opposite, actually. Whenever I’m home, I feel like I’m 9 years old again. I dance barefoot in the garden. I cook pasta at strange hours. My brother and I still make screeching bird noises at my mom while she tries to work.

The past four months in Vietnam feel like a dream that happened to someone else. India before that lives in me like a previous life. The jewel-toned saris and garam masala, the City Palace in Udaipur looking out over the calm of Lake Pichola. Distant, yet somehow folded into the person standing here by the kitchen window in the house I grew up in. 

I read through my old journals recently, and it was interesting to see how my tone of voice has changed. How what I write about has changed. Earlier, it was as if I wrote toward myself, as if I was in dialogue with a future me I was trying to meet. Now, I write as if from myself, like that future has already arrived, yet I’m always still in conversation with the past.

There’s something striking in how consistently time seems to collapse in this phase of life. I often feel like layers of multiple selves stack inside me, slightly misaligned perhaps, like pages in a book that’s been thumbed through too many times. The places I revisit accumulate these layers too. Home is never just home; it’s every version of me who walked across this exact patch of grass. 

My twenties have been one long ongoing act of temporal reconciliation. Psychologically, maybe this reflects an ego moving toward wholeness, no longer fragmented by “what was” and “what could be,” but integrating them into one fluid, continuous self.

But I’ve also been thinking, maybe this collapsing of time is less about the ego and more about returning. About what happens when a person like me – someone who keeps leaving – actually comes back. Travel teaches you to slip easily between worlds, but returning teaches you something else: how to hold them all at once without losing your balance.

When I was younger, I must admit, I thought returning was a regression. A step backward. A failure of momentum. Like if I came home, all the growth I had done out there would evaporate the moment my feet touched familiar soil. But the older I get (and by “older” I mean twenty-something-old, the kind of old that is mostly made of epiphanies) the more I see that returning is its own journey. That coming home is also a kind of pilgrimage.

Because places remember you. Even when you change, they keep the imprint of who you were before. So when you walk back into them, you’re not just returning to a location. You’re returning to a version of yourself you once knew intimately. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get to see clearly what stayed the same and what grew in your absence.

Maybe that’s why the farm feels so lush right now, not just seasonally, but emotionally. Life is verdant here. Overgrown with history and possibility. Shadowed, but kindly. It’s a place where my past selves feel less like ghosts and more like old friends.

Travel taught me movement. But returning is teaching me orientation, how to locate myself not just on a map, but in my own story. How to let the places I’ve been live inside me without demanding that I go back to them. How to understand that identity is not a straight line or a blank page but a landscape, one that keeps rearranging itself every time I look away.

I’m leaving again soon, true. I might be routeless and rootless, but I’m not lost. 

Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that home isn’t the anchor and travel isn’t the drift. Both are just different ways of finding your way back to yourself. 

But the storm clouds are rolling in now, the dogs moving towards their shelters, the tiny buddhas on the grass darkening and disappearing. 

It’s time to close the window now and let the rain come.