only my books, my music and my paintings

'My girl, my girl, where will ya go?' - Nirvana, Where did you sleep last night?

Today I've been thinking about the mechanics of leaving, the up-and-going of it all. The things that go with us and the things we leave behind. I've been thinking about the past a lot recently. The therapist I don't have would be proud.

Let's rewind a bit to 1995. I was married to K and lived in Mount Pleasant, Harare. We had a nanny for my daughter, a company car, both of us worked, life was pretty good. Friends, parties, social stuff. We were outwardly very happy, even down to the piano duets. You know how it is. We were married when I was 18 and we stayed married until the year I turned 21. They say big things happen to women each decade. I guess that's true, big things do happen to women each decade. But also, people make choices that perhaps seemed the right ones at the time, or perhaps we're not the same people we will be later.

Anyway, I was difficult to deal with, and I still am; over-emotional, insecure, chronically unable to trust, afraid of being left alone. He was laid-back, too much so; disinvested, laconic, unaffectionate; unwilling to get past the barriers that I threw up every time I suspected I might get hurt; unable to understand why, despite the confident exterior, that the interior was completely fucked up. He didn't do the things I wanted when I needed them and I didn't know how to communicate what I needed. By the time we split up the mountain between us was insurmountable and the past indelible.

So what happened then?

I just left one day. Just like that. Overnight. One day I was there, and the next I was gone and I left my whole life behind me and started over. I took only my books, my music and my paintings. I had no money, no home, nowhere to go, but at the time it seemed the right choice.

I wonder if it says something about me, that these things - books, music and art - are the only constants in what seems an ever-moving landscape for me?

I've been looking at my bookshelves today and although most of the books that travelled with me from Africa are in storage downstairs I have Kerouac's Big Sur on my bookshelf and Marguerite de Angeli's Skippack School and Elin's Amerika, both 1941 editions. I have somewhere, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and of course, the book of poetry that I've written about before.

When I open the de Angeli books I'm immediately transported to the floor of my grandmother's house, where I would wonder at St Lucia and schools where they wrote on slates and carried lunch in a pail. Ginsberg's Howl reminds me of my boyfriend N, and his friends who were so achingly intellectual, goth and hip that on Saturday nights we would smoke dope and read the beat poets to each other, in lieu of anything better to do.

K, my ex, introduced me to science fiction, for which I'm eternally grateful, especially when I can discuss Ender's Game or Fahrenheit 451 intelligently. He taught me to analyse science fiction and to enjoy it. Before I met him I was steeped in modern literature. He opened the door to a world where your imagination is only limited by the possibilities of what you can construct around it.

If I were to go downstairs and get Ray Bradbury's short stories collection, I'd remember K taking me to the library, extracting me from the modern literature shelves and walking me over to Sci Fi, where no-one ever went and saying 'here, read this, and this and this and this'. 'Meet Arthur C Clarke, this is Ray Bradbury and this is Philip K Dick who will remember it for you wholesale.' Vivid memories, and all around books.

So what do we take with us from our past? Are there memories concentrated in the dust between the pages of our old books?

When we open them and inhale, do we breathe in our past?

When we take these things with us, the books and the music and the paintings, is it because we know that years later, these things - the memories - are all that's left?