How old was I when we followed you? Six, maybe seven. The memory of tracking you still rises like steam through the cracks of my childhood. It was my father’s idea. We were camping, like we often did, at Standing Indian Campground along the Nantahala River. We awoke in our castle of a tent with two flaps that we zipped up to create rooms: one for my sister and me, and the other for my parents.
“You: young, clear faced, alert. Clutching your shiny maroon passport with the uncracked spine, wearing a light grey hijab and a white apron with the blue stencil of an employment agency logo. The girls you are with and dozens more throughout the airport wear the same outfit with slight variations. You move through the airport in clutches of four or five, propelled by anxiety and youthful excitement, eyes watching everything around you like a kettle of hawks.”
“During my first visit to the United States in June 2007, I stood outside the Việt Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., refusing to enter. I didn’t know you had just been there. As visitors streamed past me, I stayed frozen, thinking: If I go in, I would betray more than three million fellow Vietnamese who died in the American war in Việt Nam. If I go in, I would be honoring the soldiers who contributed, regardless of how slightly, to those deaths.”
“It was indigo dusk as I began the fifteen-minute walk to the 4 train. I’d spent a long day looking for my lost cat, and was so sad and worn out that I didn’t immediately notice the car that came along and drove next to me—slowly—matching my pace for too long. It was a low coupe with impenetrable tinted windows. I was on a desolate stretch: the car the only car, and me the only person. I stared straight ahead; it gunned away.”
“You held one hand to your belly, swollen with your choices. He stared at you across the table, and both of you looked at me, the three of us the only ones in the diner that night.
Maybe you were having a girl. Did the thought of her one day sitting at a diner alone, barely pieced together, scare you?”
“You’d chosen a fitting alias—unique enough to stand out from Sean Cody’s stable of all-American jocks named Mark and Ken, but not laughable like Knox or Shamu. ‘Charley’ with a y dangling off the end like a monkey’s tail was the name of a boy next door or an adored, mischievous younger brother. And you certainly looked the part, wholesome and goofy, crossing your eyes and sticking out your tongue beside a pool ringed by palm trees, declaring you felt “jubilant” that, for the first time, “dudes” would be watching you masturbate.”
"I can’t remember your name — was it Karl or Mattias? Or neither? It got lost as each person in identical green scrubs and hairnets announced their names one by one, swarming around my bare body under the cold white lights of the operation theatre. Midwives, obstetrician, surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologist. They blurred as I swung my legs over the side of the hospital bed, hunching my back as you instructed, maximizing space between the vertebrae of my spine for the puncture: failed epidural out, spinal block in. I knew the consequences of even a millimeter too far to the left or the right. I exhaled surrender, hoping you had good aim."
"You’re running, and I’m running, too. You run in black shorts, black tank, unremarkable shoes—nothing bright or flashy, not the hot magenta or neon green favored by most runners on this path, including me. But the true marvel is your hair, that long silver rope swinging down your back, keeping time with every footfall. Sterling as the sun strikes it, not coarse or fine but wavy as cursive, the occasional strand coming loose from its bind, clinging to your forehead like a circumflex hovering above a letter."
“In Norwich, I walk towards the market on a path I’m not familiar with. Occasionally, I check Google Maps to guide me. I’ve been here for only two weeks, the geography of the city has not yet been imprinted into my mind, and I suffer whenever I’m on new paths. I’m also suffering from how cold it is. I’m wearing a new thermal coat over a sweater and gloves because without them I would freeze. This is my first time experiencing such cold and I cannot believe how most of my thoughts and actions are organised into preventing the frigidness.”
“You were a young woman, freshly turned mother. Like me, a postpartum mama prone to pushing our babies strapped to the swing, pushing and pushing, days in and days out, our minds unhooked from our bodies. It would be years before I’d hear of you, read about you on the news.”
“You lived for three days.
When I was eight, I found an “It’s a boy!” card in our dad’s roll-top desk. A drawing of a bonny baby boy holding a blue balloon. I asked our mother about the card, even though I knew I shouldn’t have. She lit her tenth cigarette of the day and said I’d upset her. After that day, little brother, your story was revealed over what felt like days, but could have been hours or years. It is hard to be sure.”
“I wish you knew how wonderful it was seeing you every other morning through foggy glasses and cold-stung eyes, passing each other on our bicycles along Camino de la Laguna, each of us on our way to work.
Sometimes you had your son with you, swathed in the warmest clothes, your left hand wrapped around his little body, his head rested against your chest as he stood on the cross bar of your rusty green bicycle. The two of you were Madonna and Child, your binnies forming radiant halos. As you rode past, you’d raise your hand off the handle bar and nod, and I would always shout “Rasta!” through my mask because, as embarrassing as the memory is now, it is what felt natural to say to someone who looked like me and whose hair, dreadlocked and tied at the back, looked like mine. Our encounters warmed even the coldest mornings in Cajicá. “
“You were young too, not much older than I was. You, a Spanish guard with dark eyes; me, a blond American girl barely twenty-three, together on the worst night of my life.
I was the passenger in an old red Opel car that was stuffed with 32 kilos of hash. But, of course, you didn’t know that.’”
“Nearly two dozen disembodied mouths are kissing one another, rendered in black on a white background. They surround a handwritten quote from a Dexter Palmer novel: ‘So if it mattered that a kiss meant something in your head, and everybody had a different idea of what a kiss meant and no one had the same idea, then every time any two people kissed each other they’d be lying to each other.’”
“You sat next to me on the sofa, and asked to take off my shirt when I told you it was wet from wandering in the rain. I unbuttoned it without removing it, because in Boston it is cold even inside.
You caught my accent. I had never met someone so excited to meet a Nigerian. Your grandparents, you said, fled during “the military regime” because their life was in danger.
“Which military regime?” I asked."
“I spotted you walking past our table. You were with a friend, both holding graffitied skateboards and wearing cuffed pants and Vans. We locked eyes for a moment. You walked to the counter to order coffee. I offered to order for my friends, a strategic move for a chance to talk to you.”
“Your hands touch my bare skin. They press, stroke, rub.
“Pressure okay?” you say, the English heavily accented. I recognize the intonation immediately.
“Khon Thai ka.” The words leave my mouth in a strange way—muffled from the pillow pressed around my face, and rusty from disuse.
“Japan struck me as a generous and lonely place: strangers offered an umbrella in a downpour, a seat at a full izakaya counter, an extra pour of sake. I received each gesture from a respectful distance. In a basement dessert shop, I sat in communal silence around a pot of zenzai, speaking only to say “sumimasen.” Excuse me. The owner said I was a rare foreigner, and I did not ask what he meant. I thought of uchi–soto: the division between in-group and out-group, familiar and foreign, me and you.“
