I remember

...a mosquito net over a single bed in a room at the YMCA in Dar es Salaam. Bustling, gritty streets, open sewage, a lone woman defecating on the sidewalk. Young men with hipster glasses, colorful hats, t-shirts and frayed jeans, like any major city in the US. I remember long days stretched out, nights and days in equal measure all year long. Close to things, body odors mingled with diesel exhaust, goats and chickens and the smell of burning rubber and plastic. I remember holding hands while saying hello, sometimes for many minutes-I remember morning tripping over afternoon, falling into night, rising moon a flash-konyagi and a first cigarette. The first time alone in a house and a first heart break. A longing for friendship, for closeness. So close to isolation. I remember it not being my language or my song. I remember feeling like the worst sort of coward. Immersed but distant, foreign yet familiar, a family of strangers. I remember being a floating mountain. I remember missing home.

I don't remember nights wide awake with someone there but not there. I don't remember staying even after he had left, I don't remember drunken nights begging for a love existing only in my mind. I don't remember feeling empty, stranded, and broken. I don't remember living in fear of the stranger, wanting something concrete and spoken out loud and simple. Transparent. Honest. Colorful and bright. Light and full. I don't remember half formed sentences and explanations. I don't remember a dead year. Weighty, heavy, disembodied, suspended. Nothing held. I don't remember thinking, life is a long walk through a waterless stretch of desert. I don't remember long letters written to loved ones far away with a single desire to convince them of excitement, when in reality it was a trudge. I don't remember wanting so badly to convey my story, this story of a powerful and novel experience, the drama of my discovery of a conspicuously different culture. I don't remember a hardening heart, sensitivities calloused over, compassion merging into fatigue. I don't remember turning to disfigured conceptions of reality.

I remember a conception of reality debunked by existing reality. I remember learning to retain sensitivity. I remember somehow making a crucial connectivity with existing reality, engaging with a situation as it was found. I remember reaching out to another human being as meaning, as the most basic form of energy found in a shared experience, the wings of a hummingbird, or perhaps more subtle, a dove. The sound a faint flutter. An unwavering sense of life, of hope.

It is difficult

...to sit in an exquisite space and rub against my imperfections. 
It is far easier to face coffee stains and stray hairs on the floor and leftover food crumbs, and moss growing in the windowsill than a spotless room. 

Sometimes I need to touch or brush up against my imperfections, my own personal fallen trees, shower mold, dirt prints - 

my own personal wild disorder.  

When you move around a lot

...things come in your mailbox from previous tenants. 

You learn their name, and occasionally, you learn something about them that very few people might also know. 

Or maybe many people know. 

You don't know them.

But in a way, or in some ways,

you do. 

What some people say sometimes

"I wish..."

"I want..."

"If only..."

"I'm so busy, I can't..."

"If I had...
more time
more money
more friends
more more more more more more more more"

"Why can't I..."

"Because..."

"You are lucky. I could never do that."

"At least you can put it on your resume."

"I have too many bills to pay." as she glides her freshly manicured fingers through her freshly highlighted locks and her diamond ring gets caught.

"It is so hard being me. I work full time with kids and a husband who is never around."

"Why me?"

"My job is so stressful."

"We just don't have enough money"

"I wish someone would just come in and clean for me, cook for me, and make everything hard go away."

"Oh, but that's because you don't have kids."

"I wish life were simple."

Nobody tells the birds

... about international boundaries.

Tonight I will be on a flight headed south to Costa Rica to try to meet up with the little gray birds I became acquainted with last summer. Like them, I will travel at night. Unlike them, I need a passport.

Sometimes stories are destroyed

Cement on my street explodes.

I've seen it buckle and crack, and fill with dust and shells.

Trees don't grow, bushes get tired.

Concrete is white and silence strikes like the hard light in the mid-day sun.

A silent dream is a place without a center, where history and stories fall as thousands or millions of corpses.

Memories are scared away.

But a million buildings stand, tall or squat, white-washed with windows covered in tinfoil and metal doors. Maps and plans come wrapped in foreign fatigues and foreign faces.

Our building was captured in silence. It is parchment, vague, distant. It is wrinkled like my grandmother. 

She said if you make a habit of smiling or laughing or if you let go of your words and sounds in any old direction, pieces of you can get lost and you'll never find them again when it's time to go home.

And all those pieces will fly off into the air like the birds, and they'll lose eachother. Like letters of the alpahabet, they don't have any meaning when they are alone. They aren't a word or a sentence or a story or a memory. 

My thoughts and feelings fly off alive and warm and get lost. Further from home than ever before, flying until their hearts beat out. 

A person can lose a home.

Thousands and millions of people can lose their homes.

Their stories and memories can fly away and become thousands and millions of pieces of lost words and lost sounds. When I'm old enough, I'll go back and pick up all the pieces and put them back together again. Letter by letter, word by word, brick by brick, the stories and sound birds will come home.

Science says everything is somewhere in a law called The Conservation of Mass. It says that it's not possible for anything in the universe to just go away. The somethings might turn into something else, they might be crushed or smashed, blown-up or destroyed, but the pieces and parts are all there. 

Is it possible, then, to put anything back together again?

Can you put back together concrete buildings with metal doors, cracked cement streets lined with trees and tired bushes, pianos, rugs, chocolate, laughter? 

Is it possible to put back together words once lost as fly-away letters, melodies once lost as fly-away  songs?

Words can hurt. They are solid. They can come screaming, obscene, laughing in the middle of the night and shout at you to leave your home. I wish someone would pray for sounds and memories and lost stories-they are trapped in hell.

Silence is not without sound.

When separated,

both are an exiled, 

meaningless noise without a center,

without a pattern,

without identity or family or story or memory,

without history,

without a home.  

Hello 2013

Well hello there, 

2013! Do ya have any crickets? From, 

this guy.