The Leaning Season

He left just as I was starting to need him, which was a timely lesson in (in)dependency: it’s good not to need anything too much.  I read an article earlier today that said coffee might be extinct in 70 years, and my first thought was not, “How can we save our environment and remedy this terrible issue!” Instead I thought “Ugh, I should probably start weaning myself off of coffee now, instead of waiting til it gets super rare and expensive.”  Maybe one day I'll devote my career to saving Arabica-region coffees… but for now, I’m learning about detachment.  I’ve found that a lot of life consists of finding things that we resonate with – people, places, causes, organizations – followed by a period of loving and growing more attached to them, followed by a period of creating distance and letting them go.  It’s always like that: the drawing close, and then the backswing, the unavoidable distancing.  I’m still pretty young and maybe my life-paradigms are influenced by my mobile history, but everything seems marked by its temporariness.

One night, leaving Soma Book Café after a music show, we were squished in the back of a car with some of his coworkers.  The guys in the front seat were tossing around the word shoga as an insult (bad Kiswahili slang for ‘homosexual’) and he interrupted them and asked angrily why being a shoga is a bad thing, he said it’s a great thing, he said that Tanzanians need to accept that being a shoga is normal, and his Kiswahili was perfect -- it always gets better when he's arguing.  His friends laughed, dismissive or embarrassed (I couldn't tell which), but I think I loved him then and I catalogued all those comments in my mind, and took note of the weight he assigned to words, to people.  

He doesn’t like America very much, and I guess that should bother me more than it does, but neither of us have a strong sense of nation.  He thinks Americans call everything “awesome” until the word is emptied of meaning. He thinks we say “like” too often – a theory that I only helped to concretize.

One night after dancing to the old school beatz of Msondo & Sikinde, I slept over because I couldn’t find a taxi, or just because I wanted to. He had an itinerant’s room; spare, only partially unpacked.  There was an empty soymilk box under the kitchen sink, and colorless European toothpaste in the bathroom, and a few books scattered around the room.  His bed was neatly made. These are the things I remember:

He was washing up in the bathroom and I was flipping through a book on his bed (Outliers) and telling him about another Malcolm Gladwell book called Blink, whose thesis is that we can tell a lot about each other from our first split-second impressions, before we start misleading each other with words and gestures.  I was talking too much about things I didn’t know much about, which is what I do when I’m nervous.  He called out from the bathroom over the sound of piss on ceramic, “Yeah, we’re always acting… I mean, all of life is a performance.” And I didn't know if he was talking about himself, or about us, or about people in general; I felt that I had no gauges for him, no ways of measuring the things he said.

Later, after we turned out the lights and turned on the fan, I rolled over to face the wall and tried not to look at him, afraid that his beauty would overwhelm me – afraid that if I were to glance at his shoulders, I might reach out and touch them.  For some reason, I felt like I wasn't allowed to touch him, that I'd be breaching an unspoken pact between us if I did.  We talked a little under the whir of the fan.  Before I fell asleep, I remember feeling his weird braid between my hands in the dark while I told him about my mom.