peregrine by nature

he ran to me and asked for my Kirene bottle, one quarter full. they passed it around in a circle, taking careful mouthfuls until the water is gone and i’m no longer my own. some days you cry so hard your ribs might break.

Beaching a fishing pierog in Saly. Many Africans pay a fee to take a boat like this one to the Canary Islands to seek a better life. The trip can take up to two weeks through treacherous waters and thousands attempting it have died of thirst, exposure and drowning. A radar system has now been set up in the Canaries that detects immigrant vessels before they reach shore.

West Africa has a joie de vivre that trancends circumstance. If only I could learn as much. Senegal, you have a beautiful smile. Alhamdulilaay.

Sometimes we scare ourselves with our promise. The spirit within each of us. Sometimes I have to grip the ground to keep from jumping off.

Threads crisscross the planet binding portico to rooftop, my Dakar stoop to your Chicago flat. This is where underdeveloped meets tech; two women are grinding grain, one is taken, and the other takes a call on her Samsung.

After one month it’s become clear that I’ve been subconsciously hoping that I was, at soul, fluent. That after a few weeks of verbal stumbling along one day I’d open my mouth and all this forgotten language would gush out with perfect accent, perfect pitch and I’d be witty and interesting in Wolof and French. It didn’t happen exactly that way so, onward language lessons ahoy. I am finding them adventurous somewhat and I do enjoy learning but I’m impatient because there is so much to do, and more easily done if I could communicate better, or at all. I long for the future of cyberpunk when I can lie back, plug in and upload a language program directly into my brain, a la the Matrix, or have a memory chip inserted like Hiro Protagonist. But I begrudgingly guess the reward is in the struggle and muddle and study until you finally have that aha moment, that epiphany, the world opening before you in all its pearly glory.

And this is why I came here, to be out of my element. To live in a place where it would take real commitment to be complacent. The frustrations pale next to the payoffs, when things I agonized over in my last life, things I tossed and turned and petitioned, some of those thank God are but shadows of dreams.

The head is considered the tastiest part of the fish and the eyes a particular delicacy. One man’s fish…

Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.

Years later I still remember eyes that met mine on city streets and in museums, on car rapides and in the village. We’re only souls poured into sacks of skin, I could have been anyone.