like her Roman namesake, a child of January
is continually fixated on gateways and doors
comings, goings
beginnings and endings.

My time in Senegal is unraveling fast; I picture the calendar pages dropping to the floor one after another. How could something so big move so quickly?

During my first week in this country, I went with some of the other girls to see a fortune teller in Dakar. Her skin was gray and thick and wrinkled like an elephant’s. She was old; but maybe not so old by other standards. One of her eyes was clouded. She was heavy, but still her boubou hung almost unfilled. Tossing cowries on the ground and gathering them, tossing again, gathering and tossing, and spreading them with her elephant hands into shifting constellations on the earth, she read our shells - our pasts and futures - with remarkable disinterest. She was incredibly right on! She read one girl’s divorce; one girl’s stomach problems; another girl’s visa problems; etc. (some lighter things too … ) She predicted things about them that have since come true. But me, she couldn’t read me.

I really do believe in this. Maybe not in supernatural abilities to foretell the future, but I believe there are people with an extraordinary ability to understand, and empathize, and literally read other people. But I think it’s not so much about “powers” as it is about the exchange: one person gives a little, and the seer reads, responds. I think some people give less outward clues, some people are harder to read. Some people have nothing to read. I think I fell into this latter category.

I came here very empty, in the sense that I had tied up so many loose ends and left them, with an entire ocean behind me. And here I arrived, with little baggage, and the seer couldn’t see a thing in me.

A friend recently told me she wrote a play based loosely on me, pre-departure. I told her to send it to me, because I can’t without difficulty remember what I was thinking only eight months ago! I was without expectations. I was freaking out, slightly, but felt overwhelmingly blessed. I feel the same way right now.

I’ve got those leaving-Africa-blues!!!

Blue but rich with these memories, too, that I’ve got. Of friends, and families, and small losses and wins, and teachers, and trips, and parties, and rooftops, and telling stories, and long conversations, and blue sheep, and food and love and nighttime skies.

I'm going to a jazz festival in St. Louis this weekend, which is a fun city. The former colonial capital of Senegal, it's kind of an overgrown fishing village crossed with New Orleans. I love people from that part of the country, on the ocean and very near to the border with Mauritania; I can't explain exactly why. They are known for being very kind but very traditional, very elegant, and very relaxed.