Alone

The bar rattles in my sweating grip, the air conditioning not quite working hard enough. It's my stop next, and I'm glad. The bus is busier than usual, and it's been a tiring week for me. The bar connects between us, but it's only me holding on. Business is going well, but the extra hours studying are proving challenging to balance. I'm not alone anymore, but it's the hours I spent only with myself, which let me truly understand the meaning of me. I'm not sure I'll ever truly know who I am, but I'm learning every day who I've been, and now, after another long week working on who I want to be, I finally know where I'm going.

***

For me, it wasn't always this way. For a long time, I didn't know any of these things, and sometimes, you have to take the long way round. My journey started in Kenya, working as a cashier for a security company. The money was slow, and life moves fast when you aren't watching. I needed something to change, and Angela recommended an agency based in Thailand. "They're fine, Moussa did it and he was okay, he said he worked with computers." She said, and I trusted her, as I always would.

By the time I was ready to travel, the agency told me they'd organise my work visa for me. I was in a rush to get started as soon as possible and they were being very accommodating of that, and so my flight was booked barely a week later. I travelled alone, which I happened to enjoy. The details of my role in the agency were reserved for meetings once I'd arrived, and I stepped off the plane into the sweating heat. This was a new life, a new chance, and finally a reason to pull my life together. I'd never been this far from home before, and I used my camera at every opportunity. Bounding hills smothered in dense trees, the Thai sun snuggling behind them, I was ushered into a bus along with a group of others. Our names were written on cards as we funnelled out of arrivals, a short Chinese man guiding us through the airport. We were all African, some Kenyan, but all alone. Nobody spoke to me for the length of the drive, and I slept for the majority of it. "Excuse me? Excuse me?" A hand shakes my shoulder, an older lady with a gentle Ethiopian accent. "English? Amharic?"

"Hello, I'm, yes. English." I stuttered out of my sleep, unsure of where or why I was being woken up, "What's up?"

Another voice yelled, someone outside of the bus. It was high pitched and whiney, rushed in its tone, "Go, go!" The door creaked further open, the queue streaming past me, "Go! Now!" he continued. They left me behind, unsure of where I was. I had no choice but to trust them, to follow the crowd from a distance.

We were fed out onto the path and through a heavy set of black gates. There were four or five buildings, all flat and wide, inconspicuous by design. The lighting smudged out from underneath shutter doors or windows in thick, sterile beams of white and a dull mechanical whirr streamed behind it without much interruption from fading chatter. There were more people here, hopefully some who could tell us what was going on. I'd only been there a few minutes when the first set of guards began to surround us, shifting and shoving us into separated groups of men and women. The men were taken first to be searched, the women into the furthest building on the left. "Come, come," a different voice, once again, and a new set of faces every time I looked up from the dusty gravel path. Not one individual could be easily identified, and nobody spoke back-to-back without interruption from another voice. They were shifting between us, swapping order and tone so none of us could get a firm grasp of what was happening to us. The line entered the warehouse and up a winding set of barren stairs. "Job. Wait here," spoke the same voice, from what I could tell through the buzz of overheating computers. We were many, but each of us only had ourselves.

We waited at the top of the stairs for five, maybe ten minutes, too scared to speak and too stunned to move. It seems we were all alone together. I didn't know any names, or places, barely even faces, yet we shared the same fears. The door was locked, twenty of us squeezing onto a landing until another man finally arrived. He squeezed through the crowd, unlocking the door and shoving it open with his shoulder. Burning air gasped through the doorway, hitting me in the face with a pungent sweaty smell. There were rows of head high batteries, vines of wires tangled and wrapped around them, each attached to a flashing phone. There were easily one hundred or more men, probably half that of women, all in their own individual crisis. The ceilings were low, bodies crammed like battery chickens buckling under the weight of themselves. Nobody was fully clothed, with ripped shirts wrapped cross chests and around arms, trousers torn above the knee and a pile of shoes in the far-left corner from where we stood. The group was ushered around an edge of the battery wall, where the task at hand was explained. The man's English was rough around the edges, but I managed to piece it together slowly. Phones, bills, credit cards. We were to be scammers.

***

I don't know quite how many days I spent there before I decided I had to leave, but I know the moment my mind was made up. My clothes were thick with a crust of sweat and blood, the twenty-hour workdays taking their toll on my health. I was alone, my body failing, and my mind following closely behind. My family were back home but nobody had any idea where or how I was. I'd been living with the same group since I arrived, but I was abandoned even by myself. I had no connections, nothing to my name and nobody who knew it.

Each of us had our phones confiscated when we arrived, but I'd managed to keep hold of mine after telling them I needed to make an emergency call. The guards kept a close eye on every movement, but there were too many bodies to manage. Cracks opened and I knew I could fit through them. A persistent cough had turned bloody, and my skin flaked with dryness in the cotton-thick air. I'd wrapped my headscarf around my chest and begun working at the usual 4am start time. I didn't know anybody's names, but I'd give a nod and a smile to whoever I was next to that day. We were each provided a quota to reach, an amount of money or level of productivity we had to achieve. These levels were generally easy to maintain, for myself, as I knew the only way out was to go unnoticed. Any moment of attention meant more eyes to follow me. The girl to my left, no older than twenty and no more than skin and bone, broke off from her calls with a spinning headache. Her body rocked slowly back and forth, balance uneven. She stumbled onto the floor and her head thumped the dusty carpet, her eyes rolling back and chest gasping for a grip on the slippery humid air. She rolled onto her belly and pawed at the ground, eventually clambering back to her feet and picking up the phone. "Hey!" the guards barked, rushing over to her in pairs. Six men surrounded her as I eased backwards, careful not to involve myself in whatever was about to happen.

Her body was lumped between kicks, shifting between each man above her. The room's mechanical buzz muffled her screams, knees curling into her chest as she rolled between their stamps. Her skin was bristled and bruised, cuts opening onto the floor in pools of blood beneath her. She was surrounded, but nobody helped. We could only watch. The men stopped, a moment's respite for her battered body, two of them retrieving long metal batons from their trouser legs. They stepped back, took a second to breathe, and pushed the metal into her spine. She writhes and wraps across the floor, her body stiffening and curling rapidly, yelps coming alongside sharp jolts. She was being electrocuted, cowardly men using cattle prods to punish the young girl. I had to leave. Quickly. I couldn't help her alone, and that's all I ever was.

***

I rang the Kenyan embassy, and some officials arrived in the night. I don't remember much between. There's more than me that was saved, but all of us were too shaken to speak, and even here, we didn't know who we could trust. Once I was safe, I phoned my friends, desperately needing someone who could listen to me. There was no answer. They were probably busy. I rang again, and again, but still nobody picked up. The embassy provided me with a sleeping bag in a conference room, since the bedrooms were too full to spare for someone like me. I sat, as I often did, in complete silence, recounting the journey I'd been on. A knock on the door awoke me from the daydream, and a Kenyan woman, my age and height, entered silently. She passed me a notebook, a pen attached to the hook along the spine. She smiled, turned away, and left without a word. I opened the first page but it was empty. All of it. I flicked through and soon understood what she had hoped for me to do. I sat, as I often would, and turned the silence into scribbles. If I couldn't share my thoughts with anybody else, perhaps I could share them with myself. And I wrote:

I am unsure if this feeling of loneliness will kill me or cure me. It seems currently to be the heaviest weight I bear, the only thing that truly feels unable to be managed. I am, however, learning to embrace it. Until, when I have embraced it, I want to feel something more, and cannot. Perhaps, it is not in fact the feeling of being alone which hurts. It is that I have no decision otherwise.

***

When I made it back to Kenya, I thought it was all over. I thought the torture had stayed in Thailand. I thought my past would leave me behind, but it was only me who forgot who I was. I don't quite remember how it felt to be alive, before the old me died. I'm not sure I'll ever quite remember who I used to be, though I'm not entirely sure I want to. I never did get that phone call back from my friends, and the family I prayed to return to never came to visit me. Charities helped to keep my head above the water but it's hard to look beneath when you're struggling to breathe. My rent was covered until I could manage myself, and my studies have been keeping me busy enough to forget what I don't remember. I never stopped feeling alone, but at least I was alive.

It's not easy to learn who you are, but it's even harder when that comes with a fresh start. I arrived back here with nothing and nobody, not even myself. I'm just in the door, and once again, the house is empty. I'm hosting my family this evening, in the home I've worked for. But the work didn't start in Nairobi, in Myanmar, or in Thai embassies. The work started within, not with who, or where, or when, but why. I understand now, and I'm here to live, for my own reasons.