All we ever talk about is leaving. Have you noticed? Listen closely at any gathering, any dinner table, any queue at the bank where the lights flicker and the line moves like something dying. We live in a place we are always rehearsing how to leave.

I have been trying to understand this. Why we stay. Why the leaving never quite arrives, even when the bags are packed, even when the ticket is booked and the goodbye party has been thrown and the tears have dried on someone’s face. Something holds. Something always holds.

Maybe it is love. I know that sounds too simple for something that feels more like a bruise than a blessing. But what else do you call the thing that makes you drive past a jacaranda tree in October and feel your chest tighten? What else explains why, in a country where so much is broken, we still argue about it with the passion of people who believe it can be fixed? You only fight that hard for something you love. Indifference would be easier. Indifference would have let us leave years ago.

Or maybe it is simply that we have confused familiarity with belonging. We know the rhythms here: the way the rain announces itself with dust and wind before it falls, the way the power cuts have trained us to read the darkness like a language, the way grief and laughter share the same breath at a funeral. We know this place the way you know your own handwriting. And there is comfort in that knowing, even when what you know is difficult.

The ones who leave carry the place with them anyway. I have seen it happen. A friend in San Franscisco who still measures distance in kilometres, who still says “just now” and means “later,” who cooks sadza on a Tuesday night in a flat in Peckham because the body remembers what the mind is trying to forget. Leaving is a negotiation. And the place always wins something in the deal.

I sometimes wonder whether the talking is the point. Whether “I’m going” is less a plan and more a prayer. A way of saying: I still believe I have choices. Because the day you stop talking about leaving is the day you admit that this is it, this is the life, this is the ground you will be buried in. And that admission requires a kind of surrender that most of us are not ready for.

There is a man I know (you would recognise the type) who has been leaving for fifteen years. He has a spreadsheet. He has researched school fees in Auckland, property prices in Waterloo, visa requirements for Portugal. He can quote you exchange rates from memory. His children have never seen the countries he has bookmarked. His wife has stopped asking when. He is still here. Still here, still talking, still planning a departure that has become, without his noticing, the most permanent thing about him.

I hope you realise that  am not mocking him. I am him. We are all him.

Perhaps the honest thing would be to stop talking about leaving and ask instead: what am I staying for? What is here, right here, in the red soil and the broken tarred roads and the laughter that survives everything, that I have been too busy planning my escape to notice? What if staying were a choice, and not just the failure to leave?

I think about the jacaranda again. It blooms where it is planted. It does not dream of being a baobab somewhere else. It simply opens, purple and absurd and beautiful, in whatever soil it finds beneath it. I am not suggesting we become trees. But I wonder what it would feel like to bloom where we are. Just once. Just to see.

Because here is what frightens me more than staying. More than the power cuts and the queues and the slow erosion of things that once worked. What frightens me is arriving at the end and realising I was never here at all. That I spent my years rehearsing a departure and forgot to live in the only place I actually was.

I want to die, when the time comes to die, having lived. Fully. Present in the body, present in the soil, present in the argument and the laughter and the jacaranda light. I want to go out standing in my own life; not tethered to a bed, fading into a question I never answered. Most men die like that. Slowly. Not from illness, but from postponement. They put the living off until the conditions were right, and the conditions were never right, and then there was a hospital ceiling and a quiet room and the sound of machines doing the breathing they never got around to doing for themselves.

I refuse that. I refuse it the way I refuse to believe this place is only something to escape. If I am staying (and I am; I am still here) then let me stay like I mean it. Let me stop rehearsing the exit and learn the lines of the life I already have.

All we ever talk about is leaving. But here we are. Still here.

Still here. And, God willing, still living.