Letting Go

 

I feel fine, she told me, as we watched her ten year old walk and then run along side the length of the fence bordering the dirt road.  She had turned to the car without saying goodbye, not looking back on a decision made long ago to give him the best education she could afford, even if it meant leaving him.  Even if she would have to turn her face as he ran alongside the car up on the hill until we turned out of sight.

We learn how to miss each other, the shopgirl told me days later, when I was standing in the airport, staring at overpriced crafts, wondering how I would ever get on the plane and put ten thousand miles between me and the ones I love.  We each have our reasons, the salesman argued, when I claimed I did not want to go, even though it was long past time.

You will come back soon, the woman working security said, running through the pages of my passport, taking note of my face, long and pained.

I am learning again and again how little I know of what life requires.  Don't you know this is life, Alex told me on the phone the morning I packed and left, to say goodbye to those we love?

I didn't know, I wanted to say, but I am learning.  I didn't know there was a grace and miracle to be had in letting go.

The Secret of Everything

This is how I know you. Comfortable... talking on the phone, making plans in a language I still can't manage to understand.  Arms length from your whistle that still calls the cows home no matter what city we are in, no matter how far.

You are always mythic in my mind.  I forget you are real.  Then I see you again and you ask me to come sit beside you and listen while you play the music you learned as a boy herding the cows in the wide open plains of Uganda.  I go over the stories in my mind and try to imagine what it could possibly mean to be seven or eight or nine and possess nothing but this whistle and the confidence that comes from knowing undeniable love in the face of unimaginable suffering.

To be together is to erase a thousand sorrows, you tell me.  And I know from the whistle, it's true.

You pull out a neon orange mouthpiece you sawed off a recorder I brought to Rwanda so many months ago.  See? you gesture as you attach the plastic to the crude black plastic tube.  I listen, but it's not the same.

How can anything improve on what you already possess?  How could anything compare to the secret of everything, the power of together being all you've ever known?

To Shop for Shoes and Laugh

One morning you're standing in line waiting for water and the next you're standing in a shoe store, trying to decide on sandals that cost more money than a ten kilo bag of rice or a truckload of green bananas.  No one will ask you how you feel or explain exactly what's happening and you won't complain.

You aren't afraid exactly, but you're not exactly sure either.  Over and over again, I will find your eyes on me, waiting for the download of love from my heart to yours.  Over and over again, I will give it, because I can't help myself but love you.  In all this, you never dare once to question or to ask.

Someday when we share the same language and the same hometown, I will tell you how brave you were, how calm and how patient.  Someday you will tell me what my eyes said that kept you going, and we'll go shopping for shoes together and laugh.

To Give Your All

Sometimes without your consent, your life cracks into a hundred little pieces, leaving you with nothing left to do but sweep up the shards and try not to think about anything else but the very second you're living and the task before you. 

You report your losses when asked without pity or emotion because you know that yours pale in comparison to others you have known.  Compassion is something you traded in for commitment long ago, and so you do your work and you offer your best without fanfare or ego.

This is what is said without saying, and I understand but not from experience.  My way is to pick up my pieces and belabor them, to rearrange them like a thousand piece puzzle without the box, forgetting over and over again how anything fits.  My way is to broker my work like currency in exchange for privilege--the luxury of company in this catastrophe, a first row seat to a disaster where love always wins.

This is the picture the kid took of you when no one was looking, when all she could see was how kind you are, even when you saw her sad, even when you do the only thing left you know how to do--to give your all.



Where Chelsea Stands

One of the things I can never get over in my travels in East Africa is how loved the children are.  I grew up on images of kids covered in flies in need of missionaries and salvation, only to arrive on the continent a lifetime later and find that the only person in need of redemption was myself.

This week on a last minute quiet trip to East Africa, I spent hours and hours in a very congested city, talking to my very savvy driver Rogers.  No one will develop you, he told me, without wanting something in return.  And I knew it was true for me most especially.  For every good thing I have done in Africa, there is a deep and dark demand, a desperate longing to be folded into the togetherness for which I have no birthright. 

I did not survive the genocide, Innocent once told me, to be confused about money and love. 

But still I don't understand.  I'm still buying my way into the place where Chelsea stands, secure in the knowing she can never be alone.  I'm still hoping something will make that place inside a strong embrace the place I deserve to land, simply because I am, simply because it was always meant to be.