Integration
I swerved today while driving the short stretch home after school pick-up. Coming around the familiar bend, no cars lined either side of the empty street ahead and, before my brain could compute my confusion, my body responded— hands gripped the wheel and I veered sharply left, cortisol flooding my system, eyes locked on the distant approaching car, unsure as to which side of the road I belonged. Don’t worry, my people, I regained the right with plenty of time (don’t phone me in just yet y’all) and the oncoming car gliding past, the kids still chattering in the back as I continued on home, all in the world oblivious to this unnerving little episode except me and my poor, pounding heart.
It’s been three years since I lived in Zanzibar, where the left of the road belongs to the driver, and honestly, that life doesn’t cross my conscious mind most days. The glistening, shimmery world plays in my head like a feverish illumination— the garbled call to prayer blaring out in the early dusk, the scritch-scratch of the neighbors chickens while I lie in bed, the air already thick, clammy on my skin at dawn; the life and the person I became there have not a whiff of air to breathe in the harried suburbian hustle I pound out now on this most American pavement. She is a shadow dream, she waits in the wings— I can almost forget she ever was.
Do you have any yous like that, who have nowhere to belong?
I was someone else altogether, it seems. She embodied the skills she’d acquired with pride, every one of them hard-won. The haggling, the thrill of a sing-song language more beautiful than her own, the push and pull of learning life in another culture— the ache and joy of it all I carry with me, but the skills are obsolete and complicating in my new world, the person I was— stilled now, tucked to the back of the shelf, frozen in time.
I may be able to forget, but my body remembers. Good temple that she is, she reminds me that I exist as the sum of all my parts, not in spite of them, and the product of all the lives I’ve lived. My body reminds me of the people I’ve been— today she nudged me and said, “let them in.”
About the author: Liana Stone writes from beneath a sometimes literal pile of the most delicious tiny humans you ever saw. She and her effervescent husband, Jason, currently call Oregon home, having moved back from Zanzibar in 2020, where they served with All Nations. Liana had the privilege of not only attending the first Capetonian Church Planting Experience (CPx) in 2008, but attending a second CPx in Cape Town with Jason in 2012 (Double graduate here, people). Both Liana and Jason have a deep love for the All Nations family and are grateful for the way their time working within All Nations has shaped and impacted their life.
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