When the dust settles

Over the past few days, the Cayman Islands have been swamped with an unusually large Saharan dust plume. It is swirling its way across the Atlantic, transporting African sand to our otherwise clear Caribbean skies. It’s certainly a strange phenomena to observe, the sky is muted, all the colours sapped, the result, an insipid version of our usual chromatic view. Yesterday was almost a white-out, similar – visually – to a frosty winter’s day in a cold country, but with intense summer heat. I used to live in the arid country of Oman, so I am familiar with sand storms, but it looks so out of place here on our little tropical island. 

But thats not the reason I’ve been feeling depressed lately.

It was a bad enough blow when one of my closest friends announced she is leaving for Toronto next month. But a double whammy, when a second friend announced, on Sunday, that she is moving to Aukland. It’s never easy when friends leave. Any one who knows me well enough, also knows that I keep a tight core group close enough that I can count them on one hand. Any more, and it would get complicated to keep up the friendship in a truly significant way. Losing two at the same time feels a bit like losing two digits from the same hand. I’ll live of course, but I might never fully recover. Not without scars and a story to tell.

Since I found out the second friend’s bad news, I have been grieving in my own way. A little bit in denial, a little bit angry, a little bit feeling sorry for myself. Thank God for chocolate.

A can empathise. The Toronto family’s eldest son has been her best friend since 6th Grade. She is handling the news by consuming chocolate dairy-free ice-cream – apparently much healthier than real chocolate. What’s the point in that? I think. B can also relate to our loss, not because his best mate is leaving, but because Liverpool FC won the Premier League today. He explains that if there is one thing as bad as your club losing, its your least favourite club winning. Football is such an emotional sport. D doesn’t do emotions, and struggles to find something helpful to say. “Look, there’s a parrot!” was one of his suggestions, followed by “You don’t need them when you’ve got me.”

And while a girl is lucky when she finds her soulmate in her man, a girl also needs her girls. I have been reminiscing about all the fun times I have shared with my girl friends, whether in our homes bonded by the chaos of little children, or away on a foreign holiday where dancing definitely featured heavily. It doesn’t matter where I go in life, or how old I get, I always seem to find myself within the circle of girls who are the ones that end up on the dance floor, the ones who sing all the words, who laugh until everyone’s bellies ache, without a care in the word, while other folks might be thinking “What’s she on?!” Getting high on life is contagious, and that’s something worth catching from good people in a complicated world.

When I left Oman, as I had left Nairobi and Bangkok before, I was sad to say good bye to some friends. But we didn’t lose touch. I was heart broken when I left friends behind in Sussex, to move to Grand Cayman, but the good ones have stayed on in my life. That was a long time ago, and I have never lived anywhere as long as I have lived in Cayman, so it was selfish of me to assume that just because I have settled down, and raised a family, everyone else would too. There’s a saying that I recall when I recount the special friendships I have around the world:

“Good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they’re always there.”

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The skies in Cayman have started to clear today. And the colours have started to return, like watching the colour slowly seep back into someone’s drained face, after having recently received a very bad shock. My depression is lifting, and it reminds me that when the Saharan dust settles, there is still hope, nothing is lost, and true friendship can not be muted with distance.