A Few Lists of Things

Four square walls of concrete encase four rectangular walls of mosquito netting, all day surrounding the four limbs that protrude from my center. I could have extended my day from this bed inside of a room, but my limbs aren’t listening to my center because my mind keeps telling them it’s safer inside. Of course it’s safer inside, but it’s also much less interesting. And certainly less productive –well, perhaps less productive. I couldn’t claim staying within the confines and courtyards of one’s home has never produced productive productions. Emily Dickenson, for example, stayed behind four (or so) walls, and she is now one of the most influential poets of all time. Staying inside all day is a way of perfecting the poignant loneliness of poetic prose (or practicing pneumonic plethora).

Plus (ok, I’m done with the “p”s now), I have gotten a lot done. I took a bucket shower (once), mopped the floors (twice), and played candy crush (twenty-three times –I can’t get past level 40). I also wrote a few lists about the things I have learned, am learning, and hope to learn on my adventure here in Comoros. The actual lists are actually much longer than what I have here, but these are some of the things I think are most important:

Things I’ve learned:

1. How to contort a live tuna into dead chunks of flesh to cook, consume, and eventually digest.
2. The ocean is an extension of the sky; sometimes it feels like the only way off this island is to sprout wings.
3. “Adventure” means exciting homesickness.
4. My homemade mac ‘n cheese is delicious anywhere.
5. A smile is cross-cultural and generally reciprocated.
6. How to accidentally make friends (generally with lots of smiling).
7. The ocean is an extension of the sky; on rainy days (when the two blues of ocean and sky become one shade of bluish-gray), the boats appear airborne like Captain Hook’s ship.
8. How to say “hello” eight different ways, using four different languages, with five different meanings specific to the relationship and number of those involved.
9. Language is limiting –sometimes to a single country, to a handful of friends, to my wrong-colored, skin-covered sentience.
10. An honest smile is always an honest smile and is always comforting, even if it sometimes has less teeth than expected, or is seen only through the eye-slits of a burka.

Things I’m learning:

1. How to say more than just “hello” in two different languages, with intention to become fluent in at least one.
2. Any place that isn’t home is a somewhere without those you already love, but maybe a somewhere with those you will come to love (and maybe that isn’t a good enough reason to go).
3. What to do when a single rat becomes a rat problem, and your solution –though adorable—has fleas.
4. Who my friends really are, not just the ones wanting to use me for English (or marriage, or free food, or status).
5. The ocean is an extension of the sky; swimming in it feels like flying, but heavier and with less breathing.
6. A smile is cross-cultural and generally reciprocated, but it isn’t the answer to everything you don’t understand (sometimes you have to use other facial contortions).
7. How to cook (I thought I already knew this, but nope).

Things I hope to learn:

1. How to refrain from sarcastic comments after my roommate asks “are you home?” as though my shouting “hello” upon his entering was insufficient acknowledgement that our time and space have indeed met.
2. “Adventure” means understanding.
3. The ocean is an extension of the sky; it’s much easier to shoot for.
4. How to tan without people shouting at me for being in the sun (“you’ll turn black,” they say. “That’s the point,” I reply).
5. How to show people that skin is beautiful no matter its pigment.
6. If skin color really is skin deep, or if it is stitched into a history that I perpetuate by mistake.
7. The ocean is not an extension of the sky; it is not the limit.

Maybe now I’ll organize the four woven baskets I’m using as a dresser. Or I could wash my sheets that are covered in wax from when a candle fell from the glass ashtray, nearly starting a fire, and certainly creating a difficult to clean mess. But it’s already 3pm, and in only a few hours the sun will turn the sky-blue to pink, and orange, and yellow, and purple. Eventually both the sky-blue and ocean-blue turn to one shade of black. Like during storms, the ships’ lights fly at night.

I always stare up at space while walking from my host mother’s house to the one I share with her son. The stars melt into each other this far removed from electricity. in the southern hemisphere, the Milky Way scars across the sky, lifeblood of galaxies oozing into the black void. I read once that space is the ultimate black because it reflects no light at all, whereas most man-made black is just a dark hue. It’s pretty cool that a shade that colors most of the known universe is one hardest to recreate. And that that shade is a representation of not what we see, but what we do not. And we all don’t see (and have never seen) the same thing together.

Depending on how you think about it, that can be awesome, or pretty ordinary. We all also don’t see wind together, or fairies, or ourselves. I don’t see the moon at the same time the people that collectively make up my home see it, but I do see their sunlight reflected off of it. Their day literally lights up my night.

But tonight is a new moon. I miss you.

(Also, my kitten may have given me fleas. Send help.)

 

“Mnth. I’mph FIneg”

When I was younger, I had a lot of growing pains, so I could not sleep. My legs could feel themselves stretching (like walking for hours and finally getting to sit down). Once, I woke up in the middle of the night with excruciating pain. I violently trembled in my bed crying and begging God to take away the pain. After a few minutes, He did. The next day, my older sister told me I needed more potassium in my life and handed me a banana. My growing pains were probably why I had so many weird dreams. I would hurt in real life, so my dream life would have me hurting too. My dreams are scattered elsewhere now, maybe haunting a future story, but a few remain vivid and crisp. In one, humans had to live on the roofs of houses, or at least two stories above ground, to avoid being sucked toward the center of a large city. Some people used the suction as a means of transport, but, if they didn’t hit a building or tree just right, they would be pulled into the vortex and vanish forever. Nearly everyone lived in that city except my family and I. We were running out of supplies, so we linked arms and allowed the suction to pull us toward hope. One by one, my relatives fell into the vortex, until only a few of us were left to hope.

I would spend my summers in Podunk (Lamar) Missouri with my three siblings and my four cousins. Grandma wanted to keep us friendly with one another, so she made us play together. It was usually fun, but every once in awhile my cousins would get a bright idea. I was always the butt of that idea. Usually this involved some form of torture. When I was six, my male cousins and brother stripped me naked and tied me to a table. They thought it would be funny to use me as a dart board, though I can’t imagine why. When I wasn’t being used to throw sharp objects at, my cousins and siblings would all team up as a single force against my one-man army. They would run around, shooting me with Nerf bullets unrelentingly. I was a terrible aim, so I only hit them once or twice.

Eventually, I got fed up with being the enemy, test dummy, and/or dart board. So, I had to find someone else to play with. Usually this was myself, writing or drawing, but sometimes I would go in to see Granny (my great grandma). Her room was in my grandma’s house. It was decorated with white lace doilies, crystal candy bowls, and pink floral divans. Everywhere, there were family photos, silhouettes of Granny’s parents, paintings, giant senior portraits –all sentimental and necessary to my Granny. She and I would sit together and play cards (she had this quirk where she would breathe funny when she was thinking: “pft pft pft”).

My favorite story of hers is about her missing finger. Her right ring finger was chopped clean off at the second knuckle by an axe swung by one of her brothers. She was scared when it happened, but not as scared as her maimer. Granny told her brothers not to say who did it, so their parents wouldn’t get the poor boy into trouble. She kept the secret to her grave. Even after her parents were long dead and gone, Granny didn’t tell a soul who chopped her finger off. All we know is that it was one of her brothers. Now everyone who knows the truth behind the mystery is dead.

Granny did all that she could to model honesty and good character –even on her deathbed. She died in a nursing home hospital that definitely smelled like a nursing home: urine, perfume, and death (which smells suspiciously like lemon Pine-sol trying to mask said urine). Her hospital room was hardly big enough to hold six of the eight cousins and my favorite aunt and uncle. Granny was skinny. Her features were still normal, but they formed closer around her bones and she lacked the usual rosiness in her cheeks. Her eyes, too, had darker rims around them, as though she had been craving sleep for awhile.

“Hi, Granny,” I stuttered. My mouth and eyes were dry. “How are you doing?”

“lmnth. I’mph FIneg.” She just had a stroke, so I couldn’t understand her well. I think she said she was fine, but maybe she said, “I’m dying.”

We talked for a moment. I told her of a few things going on in my life –of my novel and my plans for the coming school year– and left the room with the rest of my family when it was time the nurses to change her adult diaper. While we were waiting outside, I told my grandma I wanted to stay and help out –that I could read to Granny or talk to her or something.

“You can stay if you want,” Grandma said in her blunt, simple voice, “but it’ll be boring. There’s nothing to do.”

I contested, but eventually agreed with my grandmother’s logic (with help from my cousin who wanted to go out) and decided to leave.

Before we left, I said goodbye to Granny. I hugged her and kissed her cheek with my dry lips and told her I would be back tomorrow.

“No,” she said clearly, “you don’t haph to do that.” She sounded almost normal when she spoke, but her messy “have” proved the sentence was difficult to say.

I reassured her that I would be back, that I would see her again.

“No!” she kept saying, insisting, “It’s Ok.”

So I left, free of my promise to see her. She died before I woke up the next day. She freed me of a single, accidental lie. I try to be as honest as I can be now.

“The night she died, I sang Christian music to her to quiet her down,” Grandma told me later. “She was unsettled until I thought of singing hymns. And about two hours later, she peacefully went home.” My grandma took a breath and brushed off her blue floral mumu by force of habit rather than necessity. She had worn that mumu since before I can remember, though now the color brought out permanent bruises on her legs she’d earned from years of yard work. Grandma scratched her cheek and said, “The nurses came in and stood at the door and listened. The curtain was around the bed, so all I could see was their feet, but I knew they were there. I knew. Even though I am not a singer, and forgot lots of the words, and made them up as I went along, we were ministering to the nurses, mom and me.”

I didn’t cry over Granny. Tears welled up in my eyes upon viewing her casket, but, still, I held them back. Grandma was preparing the funeral, and I decided I would help in any way I could. Most of that meant keeping Grandma company, but Dad and I decided to do the hardest job for her: check on Granny’s body. We went to the mortuary to see Granny in her bed and make sure she was prepped right. It was an old fashioned building. The siding was whitewashed, and there was a covered porch with two double-doors leading inside. Dad examined the pamphlets for the ceremony. I examined the dark forest green carpet holding me up. Dad asked questions about the casket. I questioned the purpose of anything more than a wooden box. Dad hid a few tears when he finally saw Granny’s skin held together by preserving chemicals. I hid mine too as I stared at Granny’s bright red lips, wanting nothing more than to hear them “pft pft pft” their way through a card game.

The funeral was magnificent. People from all over the country came to celebrate Granny’s life. It was a huge family reunion –in fact, we were having a reunion that weekend in memorium. Random third cousins and twice removed aunts surfaced and introduced themselves to me as “the other family.” My dad and uncles led the service. Grandma said, “God is so good and encourages and gives us comfort in times of sorrow.” My sister read a poem entitled “Lighthouse.” My brother played a song. I spectated. Everyone was cheering at the end of the service because of all she had done for the hundreds of people there. I’m not romanticising her death, this actually happened. After the funeral, my cousins and I played some basketball. I made a few baskets, but mostly just blocked shots.

The next day we had to put Granny in the ground. All of the random relatives had gone or couldn’t make her burial. In fact, the only people beside me on the dark green grass were my grandma, grandpa, and twin sister, Logan. And the guy who operates the machinery. Grandpa read from Psalm 23, crying the whole way through it as the wind messed with his comb over and rustled the pages of his little black book.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

Logan was looking mostly at the ground, though I don’t blame her because the the sky was overcast. She was holding herself, and keeping as still as any other time I could remember. Grandma was staring at the gold-adorned casket with white roses on the cover. She had this look of finality on her face, and another of confusion. I didn’t know why she was confused though. There was nothing left to do; it was finished, as they say.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over.”

I wasn’t sure where to look, or what to do. My eyes moved from person to person. I knew I didn’t want to touch anyone, and I didn’t want anyone to touch me. It was time to be alone with them. To not feel anyone, perhaps because Granny wasn’t going to feel us anymore. I found comfort only in my Grandpa’s voice reading Psalm 23.

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

As Granny was being lowered into the ground, Grandma, Grandpa, Logan, and I walked down the newly paved country road to the church. Grandma was quiet, an unusual sensation. I couldn’t help but focus on the darkened street.

“Amen.”