Change for Gas

Sometimes when I lay in bed at night, after I have already drifted out of full consciousness but before I have completely crossed the threshold of a dream, I walk through our home in North Africa. I think I am so desperate to remember, to cling to a reality that is already fading around its edges that this practice  brings me comfort. I usually start on the front stoop and spend a moment with my hands on the wood frame of the door feeling the grainy arch of the incessant termite tunnel winding up the wood under my fingertips. It’s mid-afternoon towards the end of the rainy season so the air is still and hot, but already beginning to hesitate a little at the approach of evening. I gaze up at the hill to my left and watch a herd of goats lazily make their way towards the top. In the splotchy camouflage of the hillside I can’t find the small boy tending them from some shady perch, but I hear the small stones he tosses clatter pleasantly down towards our back fence. A hawk soars overhead motionlessly. I watch it for a moment and then turn and walk through our living room, my bare feet making sweeping sounds as they graze the cement floor. I notice the disarray of our bookshelf and make a mental note to organize it sometime. A lizard scurries across the wall and disappears behind a big clay water pot propped in the corner which holds up the leather-sheathed sword that Bryan bought from an old man on the streets of D___ one day. Nimir flicks his black ears in the direction of the lizard but grants him a reprieve and stays reclining on the couch. I move into the kitchen, past our green gas refrigerator, its pilot light buzzing quietly behind it. The long sheer blue curtains I asked a tailor in town to make out of a tobe to keep the dust off my pots and pans stirs very faintly as I walk past my cabinets. They don’t keep the dust off of anything. On the island I see my cracked wooden cutting board and a pile of inverted lime halves in a sticky puddle, the byproduct of the limeaid now cooling in the fridge. My cookbooks slump on the counter (I confess, Better Homes and Gardens looks a little incongruous in this particular kitchen) and near the stove is a tiny Arabic coffee cup full of singed matches used to light my temperamental oven. Above me I hear birds waddling across our tin roof, their claws scratching loudly as they click-clack overhead like fat women in high heels. I’m at the back door now and I pause in the doorway again. The porch is dotted with a few empty basins, a bar of soap flecked with ash and two wood and rope footstools from the market. Just beyond the porch is the path to our shower and beyond that our sloping bamboo fenceline. In the distance I can see out over the tall grass to the stony path that winds around the hill, a shortcut to the main road. But at this time of day no one is on it. 

I inevitably fall asleep before I ever make it off the back porch. Somehow this nostalgic taxidermy of memories is soothing to me and I enjoy, even if a little sadly, the process of not forgetting. But if remembering a place and familiar things is what puts me to sleep at night, remembering people and imagining where they might be is what keeps me up. I try to keep my thoughts in check, balancing full-hearted prayers with senseless fear mongering in my mind. But sometimes I let go a little bit and imagine familiar faces and where they might be right now. I see Aisha sitting with her small children under a scraggly tree with dozens of other women, all waiting for the UN food distribution for the day. She is thinner than I last saw her, though still beautiful which makes me uneasy for different reasons. Without her husband here she is vulnerable. All the same I am almost guiltily glad for the marriage problems earlier in the year. There is another tree in the distance where women with swollen feet wait for the pains that will bring their babies into this difficult world. And for now, she does not sit among them. I think of Daniel too. He is scavenging for plants and abandoned sorghum to feet his grandchildren hiding in the bush, his gnarly hands still as strong as men half his age. The days are cannibalistic, each twenty-four hours eaten up in a search for enough food and water to survive another twenty-four. The family occasionally sees others hiding in the scrub brush and they exchange small pieces of news or messages from a relative. But mostly they keep to themselves. They cannot risk attracting the attention of the antanovs overhead.

But yesterday we got an email that put to rest some of the darker of these daydreams, if you can even call them that. A friend from K___ wrote to say that our guard had shown up at the refugee camp across the border and wanted to see if we could get him some cash to buy fuel to drive our ATVs to the camp as well. The beautiful absurdity of the email made me laugh out loud. Hi. Just checking in to say we need some gas. The car still in a war zone. Hope you guys are good. Ok, well, thanks and hope to hear from you soon. My Lord, are your families with you? Is everyone ok? Who all is where? Is anyone left behind? And for goodness sake, how in the world do you have access to email? This is what I want to yell out in all caps across the world. But I have to be patient. The answers will come, though maybe slowly and in pieces. 

But I have something new to imagine now. I still don't know where Aisha and Daniel and many others are but I know where one family is. I see Abdul and Ibrahim and their families hanging out in the boonies with our, (I’m quite sure absolutely trashed) ATV waiting for some gas to get them all the way to the camp. I don’t want to make light of the horrors. I can’t imagine the conditions they must be in. But they’re alive. And they’re together. And Maslow would lead me to believe that if they are at all concerned about the future of this motorized hunk of metal and rubber, then they must be in at least some sense of the word, ok. This makes me very happy. And it makes me dare to believe that maybe someday I won’t have to imagine anymore but will get to see and taste and smell and hear and hug really, really hard all my future memories myself.
 

Date

It’s so intimidating to write after being gone for so long. Much like my body that has been plied with holiday sweets and then left to gel in the car for hours and hours of long road trips, my brain is out of shape and weary with disuse. I have weeks and weeks of backlogged things to write about but I’m sitting here at a complete loss of where to start. I’m taking a writing class this spring and I am a bit concerned that I will hardly be able to complete articulate sentences much less whatever else will be expected of me. But just like the Yoga video I contorted my stiff self awkwardly through yesterday, I guess my only choice is just to get up and get my mind moving again. Let’s all pray that, unlike my abs today, my creative muscles will be a little less sore tomorrow.

So, we’re back in Texas after a long pilgrimage from Louisiana to Georgia and Arkansas and back again. For reasons that are varied and complicated, the holidays were bittersweet – genuinely and deeply sweet, but with an underlying tang of heartache. But now, after three months of living out of suitcases that have been hauled from the trunk of the car to a relative’s guestroom half a dozen times or more, we are settling into a place where we can just be. We are sinking are toes slowly into a house that though not really ours, is kind enough to pretend to be so for a while. The pattern on the plates is unfamiliar, but the dishes offer up food I cooked and that tastes like a thousand memories of meals gone by. With each passing day, whether by my daughter’s toys drifting further across the house like flotsam on some quiet tide, or the new towels that smell less like Walmart and more like Bryan’s soap, the house warms to us. It’s a place where we can just be us, which in this season is a gift.

Last night Bryan and I went on our first date in nine months. Perhaps to the skepticism of a younger version of ourselves, we opted for the somewhat cliché black-dress-Italian-restaurant-lingering-dinner-and-a-glass-of-wine kind of evening. And it was good for our souls. We haven’t been alone over a meal in longer than I can remember, and yet just like my mother always said we would do, we spent the first half just talking about how amazing our daughter is. (I mean really, did you see how incredible those two little teeth are? She’s growing them perfectly, and all by herself! She’s absolutely brilliant.)

But somewhere between the bruscetta and the cappuccinos, practically midsentence, a unexpected lump welled up in my throat and I started to cry. In the past three months there has been a lot to cry about, happy tears and sad, but for some reason I have been mysteriously dry eyed. In moments of acute stress and deep joy I have been strangely composed, (at least on the outside), something downright bizarre from someone who can’t watch Tangled without a box of Kleenex on hand. But last night, a few notes in a song or a combination of flavors or a tone of voice pressed up against a place inside me that had worn a bit thin and I felt something give. And the tears came pouring out. Some tasted like grief and loneliness. Others like joy and intense gratitude. One or two still had a lingering hint of surprise from things no longer surprising at all. But they all tumbled out together. When I finished crying into my starched white napkin, smearing my eye makeup and making our waiter uneasy, I looked across into the eyes of a man who simply smiled and held my hand. He didn’t ask for an explanation or appear worried or hurt. He just let me take a deep breath and said, “It’s all going to be okay.” And I believe him.