Sam died in a country we lived in but could never call our own. From the late 1990s onwards, a generation fled Zimbabwe. The country was young, a mere decade into the independence project, when the so-called liberators took off their masks to show us the faces they’d been hiding: oppressors play-acting revolutionaries. They put yokes on our necks and continued the work of killing us, slowly. The country became a land of dead dreams. A crumbling economy and a repressive political climate served as backdrop as Zimbabweans left in droves. My family broke too, scattered to three continents. We built homes in new places and tried to re-make ourselves. We contorted our tongues and learnt how to speak with new inflections. In the new places, no one cared about the lines we traced through our history or the memories we carried in our chests. We chased papers and “white” passports. Maybe if we had them, they’d treat us like we were human? We taught ourselves new ways of being and layered the meaning of home. We taught ourselves to avoid talking about the things we longed for, wore masks to hide the bewilderment we felt about lives that hadn’t turned out the way we imagined. We tried to forget the places inside us where dislocation met loneliness. Sometimes it worked. Mostly, over time, we disappeared from our own bodies, haunted by death.

Fifteen years into the displacement project, Sam grew weary. She ended her life on a cold winter’s day. We packed up the house she had lived in with tears in our eyes and glasses of Canadian whisky in our hands. With death hunting her, she had left instructions on yellow sticky notes: trash, donate, for Sane. We found a box that reminded us of the carefree years of adolescence. Close to the bottom, a picture of a smiling Sam from the year we turned fifteen. She had dyed her hair blond during one of the school holidays. She wore it closely cropped to the scalp, slicked back with palms full of Blue Magic hair gel. A nose ring glinted back at the camera, the expression in her eyes relaxed. In the same box I found a journal from the year we turned sixteen. She wrote poetry on its lined pink pages and practiced her signature in the margins.

By the time we finished packing up the house, our parents had arrived in Canada. They came two weeks after she died, carrying passports bearing visas that had required expedited and “compassionate” processing. We brought them to the house and watched silently as they peered into the boxes and picked out items to remind them of the daughter they’d lost. After it was all done, I was haunted by the image of my father in a too-big winter coat, snow at his feet, taking a picture of the house his daughter had died in.