Into the Furnace

"El culo del mundo" is what my Spanish friends elegantly used to call an undesirable place they never want to go. Nigeria certainly falls under this category, and I recently said that phrase back to them when asked how things were where I was. One of the most corrupt countries in the world, and recently ranked the third most unlivable, is not appealing to international flight crews either. An Etihad attendant told me they always post the Lagos route hoping someone will on a whim swap it (they never do), not even wanting to touch down, disembark, and leave 35 hours later, the company not even allowing them to explore outside the hotel. I told her a bit hopelessly that I'll be staying a bit longer, long enough to not really see the endpoint, what drove me here, or where this mess really even began. In short, my few months in Lagos by a number of standards, will effectually constitute the worst and most unwanted place I'll ever live.

I woke up first night to a dense tropical West Africa rain, straight out of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I asked myself from the confines of my bed why I do this, going off to places where kidnapping stories run rampant, the police are toll booths, the diseases that much more ghastly, and the list goes on. With such a short life, why spend any time in the terrible places that run under every sort of dysfunction and keep trickling by, when New York City and Los Angeles and even the peace and quiet of Austin are very much within my reach? The answer I continue to fall back on is that in this time alone behind high walls, surrounded by misery and repression and anger, and a country imploding on itself from all directions, there continues to be great value - in finding what you're made of and what is left in the dark spaces when you truly are all alone.

When you put cargo on board a ship, you make that venture on trust,
For you know not whether you will be drowned or come safe to land.
If you say, "I will not embark until I am certain of my fate," then you will do no trade: the secret of these two destinies is never disclosed.

The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one must take fire in order to get light. 

Moving on

I was beside the bed alongside my mother, holding my grandmother's hand when she took her last short gasp for breath just hours after I arrived. Five years of cancer treatment, mostly centered around the lungs, had finally caught up with her, and I felt the heart stop beating and the skin go cold to my touch. Her eyes, which had been opened and dazed for a number of hours, closed profoundly on their own. Then she lay still and peaceful like she was in a deep sleep, and just like that it all was done. Having now experienced it first hand, I find it was one of the most surreal experiences there is, being that intimate with someone else's death. Before people died in a far off place, disappeared, and what's left sits abstractly at a tombstone in the ground. Now life comes and goes through your fingertips, and that is how fragile and tangible a thing it is.

My grandmother was there when I was born. My mother says it was my grandmother's hands alone that quelled the pain of childbirth, and that when she took them away it became unbearable. There are lovely photos of me, small and tired, wrapped up like a burrito watched over by my grandmother's smiling gaze, and I think there is a lot to that, me being here and her being there, with 25 years of separation. As the peculiar people that run funeral homes rolled her out of the house to be cremated, it felt mostly like this miniature cycle that makes up many larger cycles had reached some sort of fruition, and now a new one will begin.

I went for a hot run the day after she went, up the farm roads surrounding Cleveland, through grassy fields blowing like waves in the breeze, and rusty barns showing no sign of activity. To be honest, I felt coated in death and stagnating bodies, the breakdown of our bodily systems, the physical demise from age and unhealthy lifestyles, and I just felt the need to be alive again. I took deep breaths and felt the burn in my legs and the hot sun pouring down on my skin. I paid special attention to the little sparrows gliding in the wind, and the smells of North Dakota countryside. It was just over a month ago I myself sat stagnant on a hospital bed, my body fighting off a dangerous and invasive infection, and it is not too much a stretch - given an influx of horror stories - to say things could have gone down a bad road quickly.

But the cars roll along the highway outside my grandmother's house like they always have, and I am still here, the pace of things just a touch slower. A robin hops up to the window, and the trains rumble by outside in the night. Baby birds cry out from the houses for their mother to come back with a worm, and I still remember those glorious feeders, attracting all kinds or yellow finches and red sparrows, that used to sit outside the door. Grass from the old bog at the corner of the yard is tall and untamed, reminiscent of my old summer playground and annual project. The gardens that never quite worked. The garage that never grew organized. The artist hobbies that were just never realized. It could all be my childhood or now or sometime in the future, just missing one of the integral parts, the woman who made those memories and visions a reality. Things keep going; they move on quickly.