About a month after arriving in Qatar the kids and I
attended an event at the Museum of Islamic Art for World Literacy Day. Somehow
a conversation grew between me and a woman who’d moved from Qatar from Brooklyn
with her husband, three-year-old, and five-year-old. Her youngest was almost
the same age as my youngest, we both lived in high-rises in West Bay, and we
hit off nearly instantly, recognizing kindred spirits.
Doha’s West Bay is mostly gleaming, daringly-designed
skyscrapers with luxury SUVs buzzing around their bases. It’s as far from any
intention I ever had about where I want to live as it’s possible to be. We
walked to our new friends’ building, dodging traffic and lugging bright
inflatable rings, to play in their indoor pool. They came to ours to celebrate
our four-year-old’s birthday, and made her shadow puppet presents.
A free bus line opened in West Bay, and the day we decided
to try it we were the only riders, Pharrell Williams
singing “Happy” with us over the sound system. It dropped us in a hot
empty parking lot not too far from the new French supermarket, where we bought
food for a picnic. We ate at the base of Doha Tower, below ground-level and all
shady against a huge wall of plants, a miracle in the desert. We felt smug for
having discovered it, even more smug for managing to enjoy our picnic there
without being shooed off by security guards. Sometimes she and I met without
kids on the weekend to walk the Corniche from MIA to West Bay. One
day she showed me her sketchbook and her drawings of Doha were beautiful-
points of view on the city I hadn’t even considered.
Within a week of getting my driver’s license, after being
reliant on drivers for five months, I drove us and three of our children out of
town and across the country in search of winter green grass and flamingos and
camels. A few months later we ran down sand dunes and waded in the sea to
celebrate my 40th birthday. She brought me a card of her drawing of the plants
where we’d had the picnic.
And then they left, less than a year after we’d first met. I
was as glad for them to be going somewhere that better matched their family as
I was heartbroken to say goodbye. I went reluctantly to the goodbye
gathering at the park with kids, and then a smaller one in the souq with
adults, where we all laughed and ate Syrian food, until it was time to drop her
off at the hotel where her husband and kids and cats and suitcases were
waiting. It’s the eternal expat heartache, someone is always leaving, but she
was returning to the USA so there was a good chance we’d manage to see each
other again.
We stayed in touch, talking over the summer when I was in
Vermont. Returning to Doha after the summer holidays, I missed her terribly. A
mutual friend and I started exploring Doha on foot. Together we navigated
roundabouts and crossed busy lanes of traffic and once managed to charm
ourselves through the gates of a farm with big tortoises and camels. We stopped
each other to point out interesting sights and delighted in small discoveries-
a sinkhole, a cat with pumpkin orange eyes, huge pillows of hot bread that we
watched coming out of a wood-fired oven and then ate sitting on a back-hoe
scoop. We walked further and further, exploring backstreets all over the city from
the desert outskirts to the sea, through abandoned buildings, deserted suburbs,
and the bustling, crumbling remnants of old Doha. We figured out how to bring sprayers to cool
our heads and frozen bottles of water that would be luke-warm by noon.
When it got too hot to walk safely in the daytime we’d meet after the sun went
down. 
I started drawing again too, after a many-years drought. I
began with a class at VCU Qatar and eventually started joining fellow artists
for plein-air sessions all over Doha. For two years I walked and drew and made
more friends. I stopped hating Doha and even began to love it as I got a fuller
sense of what lay behind the façade.
The second year of walking we heard from our artist friend that
she had been diagnosed with cancer. We sent our love, when all we really wanted
was to be there with her, or for her never to have left, to still be whole and
healthy and with us and all our kids at the playground. We wondered whether we
should work on trying to visit while there was still time, and we worried about
our friend and her family.
We kept walking and I kept drawing, and then I left Doha
too. My husband’s contract was up. We bought a house, dismantled our belongings
in the home we’d created in Doha, flew back to my home state, and settled in. I
missed my walking friend like crazy. I wished she was along on every walk I
took, to share how exotic the hills and trees and wild clouds and snow
seemed. I stayed in a light kind of touch with our artist friend, trying to follow her lead on how much she
wanted to talk about her health, which was very little, so we talked about our
kids and being outdoors and the novelty of winter.
Finally my walking friend and I decided it was time to go
visit, in case we wouldn’t have a chance again. We discussed dates in October
and then March. We proposed it to our artist friend, got an enthusiastic
message back, and began looking at flights.
I started singing with a hospice choir, and the week we heard
from her husband that she had started hospice care was the week I started going
to sings for patients. I imagined begging the scheduler to assign me to a sing
at my friend’s bedside, but our sings are all in Rutland County and my friend
was 2000 miles away.
You know that feeling when you know you’re sad and you know
why, but don’t realize how sharp the grief is until you hear that certain
harmony that feels like it could cleave your muscles from your bones? You almost wish it would.
Christmas neared and we were hoping that maybe just maybe if
she’d held on until now, she would still be there in March when we got there. In
late December I took a walk on a back road with my dog and was singing to
myself, this round I’d just learned:
Oh
the wind it is a song that harbors through the winter,
oh
the sail it is a door that bids the song to enter,
and
let us sail the seas good friend,
and
let us sing together,
the
singer lasts a season long
but
the song it lasts forever.
And as I sang I was somehow having a conversation in my head
with my friend 2000 miles away about her leaving. She died the next morning.
We decided to continue with plans for the trip. At the very
least my walking friend and I would be reunited, our artist friend bringing us
together again just as she had by leaving Doha in the first place. The world’s
a big, expensive, busy place and expat friends are scattered far and wide; I
know I don’t have much hope of seeing many of them in person again. The trip
both affirmed the possibility of reunion for far-away expat friends and made painfully real that one reunion that won’t ever happen.
I didn’t know when I decided I wanted to be an expat that
part of being home in so many places was the necessary self-deception, every
time, that it’s permanent. It’s home for as long as the contract lasts, or as
long as we’re willing to look for new contracts to prolong our stay. It’s about
being willing to make friends quickly. The leavings, ours and our friends', are
hardest when the carefully-constructed illusion of permanency falls apart
completely. We get a lot of practice at pretending home and community are constants and then letting go of them again to start fresh somewhere
else. Do I leave a part of me in every home or do I bring some of it with me or
both? I’m a
patchwork person, carrying an awareness of multiple people, climates, seasons,
cultures, and expectations. Somhow it's grounding and disorienting all at once. I almost never tell anyone I meet anymore where I
used to live before Vermont, but it doesn’t keep me from still having it all
inside.
