Scratch

Last night in the shower I was hit with an unexpected bout of cultural vertigo. I had bent over under the shower head pounding out almost-too-hot water to scrub the city off of my feet when I noticed a thin scratch on the inside of my ankle. Nearly healed but still raised and pink, it was half-hidden under a swath of raspberry lather. I had forgotten all about the scratch but seeing it again caused a flurry of ripples on the still surface of my heart. I remembered exactly when I got it. About two weeks ago three women carrying heavy loads of firewood home had stopped to rest under a tree outside our fence. Our guard had taken a pitcher of water out to them and had come back with word that they wanted to see the khawaja baby. I had time to kill so I went outside with Annabelle and sat down on the long rough tree roots and watched them pass my daughter between them. We had the most normal conversation. How's your family? How are your kids? How many do you have? How far away is your house? Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the pleasant kind of talk that you can sometimes have with strangers. While we chatted goats grazed on the hill behind us and our guard plucked out wiry tunes on his robaba that hovered hesitantly in the still air. Five or six boys loped by like a pack of hunting dogs, shiny and clean from a bath in the gulley full of brown rain water. I rummaged around in my brain for misplaced Arabic words and they chatted to each other every once in a while in their shared mother tongue. When we ran out of things to say we just sat under the tree and looked at the baby. Eventually the sun was low enough on the horizon that the hungriest mosquitoes were braving their way out, so we rose to go our separate ways. But when I stood up I stepped back into one of the loads of firewood and gashed my ankle on a rough splinter. It didn't hurt that badly and I had forgotten all about it until last night. But standing on a tile floor in a bathroom cloudy with steam, it was weird to see that mark on my ankle and remember the day I got it. I was reminded of a day and a place that felt so very far away and yet amazingly, were as close as unhealed skin. There is a line in a Maya Angelou poem about someone waking from a dream of a walk by the sea and reaching down to find sand in their pockets. I felt like that last night. Like I had dreamed of another home and woken up with it's scars on my skin.

We're in Nairobi. Again. We were supposed to be here at this point anyway. We have a conference to attend in a few days. But we left North Africa a week early after news (rumors? stories? reports?) of more soldiers, more airplanes, more artillery, more threats reached a point that we felt like it was time to go, for now anyway. Our prayer is that things will be fine for us to go back in a week or so. After all, nothing has happened in our state as of yet. Of the three "contested areas" one has been razed to the ground and the other is being inundated with bombs. But our state hasn't been touched. Does this mean nothing will ever happen? Does this mean it's only a matter of time? Who knows. My biggest fear is that this wretched anticipation of nothingness will linger on for weeks and months leaving us in perpetual uncertainty.

I hate how far away that place feels when I am here. Missing there terribly and enjoying here thoroughly rub against each other like bare feet in too-small shoes leaving me feeling chaffed.