Around the Bend

June 7, 2007

Today is 11 months in Cape Verde.

June 9, 2007

I haven’t been able to write a word in a good amount of time. Instead, I have been devouring the words of others as though my life depends on it. Lately I’ve read about a novel a day, the newest incoming stack of Newsweeks from the Peace Corps office in Praia, the 20-page letter my grandfather and his wife wrote me, the cards that have been coming in for my birthday.

I notice I have been looking at the photos sent close up, inspecting every detail of the captured images, expecting to find this or that familiar scene somehow changed. I trace the recognizable curves of my mom’s handwriting – the handwriting that I used to find under my pillow those mornings I awoke to gold dust and felt with the edge of my curious tongue a gummy gap in my mouth – the same letters that the cookie-loving December visitor would leave on magical mornings, covered with crumbs. I inspect the lovingly drawn lines as though not the words but the actual shifts and tilts of the hand itself will reveal the mood of the room in which it was written.

Did she write this in the morning? I wonder. Was she drinking coffee on the patio and listening to the birds at the fountain and roses she has no doubt planted in her new yard? Or did she write this at night from her bed as she wore her reading glasses and a soft robe that smells like face cream? Was she in a rush and grabbing her rollaway suitcase on her way to the LAX airport or was she lounging in the long afternoon hours as she sipped iced tea? Letters can reveal any number of details, but these are the ones always left unwritten.

And so I dive into the stories of others.The strokes of imagination massage my mind and I find parallels between everything I read. The last novel sent was written by the same author I had just read. I’d never heard of her before last week – now two of her greatest works have been digested in my mind. They were made of the same substance of the countless other books I have read in the past couple weeks. Are there really so many hauntingly resonant topics that echo in the chambers of my soul? Is life, in fact, very limiting in this way, or is it limitless beyond measure? One author uses science as a way to describe the complexity of the universe, and how small we are in it, while simultaneously I discover lines on another page from another book, describing the infinite amounts of cells and activities going on simultaneously within the universe of our bodies. I swear, a girl could drown in this kind of relativity.

So in the “big” picture (however big that may be) I suppose speculating on the quickly passing moments of my mother’s letter and the environment in which it was written seems a bit obsessive, but dammit, those tiny teeth that were replaced with loops on a paper and splashes of stardust stuck with me, however minute the detail. The way my mother’s robe smells when I hug her appears to have had the ability to shift the tides of the ocean in my heart. And relatively, I just can’t accept the fact that these photos I am receiving aren’t holding hidden messages about a life still existing from the other side. What arrives in envelopes and packages reveal a double-sided mirror for me to look through. I see the reflection of the past, but it is tinted always with future. A future that is breathing, and with each breath life becomes more precious than the second before. In the absence of a year, it all amounts to a pretty big pile of precious seconds. Too many to count, so I don’t.

“There is only one moment, and the moment is now, and it is eternity,” right Teej? I’m beginning to believe it.

June 10, 2007

Wonders (again, not a poem)

I sometimes wonder if -
As time moves along
As it rests its weighted heap,
Shove by shove,
Along the endless concrete walk -
The snag of the expedition
Will spoil my mind’s rendition.

I sometimes wonder if –
As inconsistencies of thought
Melt away,
Strand by fragile strand,
An intertwined piece of fate –
The numbness of century’s bend
Might harp on the battered end.

I sometimes wonder if –
The brilliant, excavated sun
Harrowed of its purpose,
Damaging the earth,
And my skin –
Might say goodbye one day
And be on its way.

I sometimes wonder if –
As the generations amount to numbers
A long, decimal point of fact,
Daunting in its magnitude
Spinning along an axis of endlessness –
I may piece together again
The significance of what I am.

I sometimes wonder if -
Always have wondered really
Despite rational, uncomplicated thought,
Years of learned pace,
Innocuous precision –
I am making it all up as I go
And if that’s truly the direction to blow.

I sometimes wonder if –
I too am lost in my personality
Amidst the gates of kingdom,
Cunning and correctness,
The scattered assumptions of possibility –
Not knowing the answers is a death sentence
Or rather a ticket to mercy’s expense.

I sometimes wonder if –
Oh my God, do I wonder,
Do I pace
And pulsate
And sneer in my wondering,
Just beyond the jagged upturn of doubt –
If this is a journey of time that sank
Or an investment in eternity’s bank.

I hear my thoughts fall like coins
And they echo and clank in perplexity
Into the abyss of the unknown;
Into the heart of the innermost chord of worth
Of functioning
The brain of matter itself
The colossal engagement of it all
The master of the unguided,
Unformed,
Unsure.

And Uncertainty’s closest companion is Questioning,
Who is a distant cousin of Curiosity,
Who I heard one day became engaged to the family of Wonder.
And to this day they live
Together in a house made of fragments of reality
Which they have strung together in order to survive.

Their children are a perfect blend of Interest and Awe
Yet Cynicism and Doubt live there too,
In a sweet little house of truth and lies -
And no one can tell the difference between the two.

June 21, 2007

Time is now an intangible thing. It is measured only by the days on my calendar, yet even that remains strangely misleading as the numbers fly; firm numbers written in a bold print and separated distinctly by fixed, solid lines. It makes it all look so official and permanent, but I know better. I understand that June 21, 2007 is not really anything to me now, nor was it anything to me yesterday, and it will likely dissipate into the future. What stays with me is this disjointed concept of time passing. If it were not for the smile lines forming along the edges of my eyes, I may liken the concept of time to an imaginary friend. It lives only within my mind.

And so I have been a teacher here for an entire school term. Three semesters, 87 students, about 384 50-minute classes. Last year I didn’t speak Kriolu. I did not know the child leading his donkey to the community well was in my universe. At the beginning of January, it is safe to say the person I was then may have never known the country of Cape Verde existed. I would not have my cat curled up and nestled into my lap as I write this entry. My roommate would still be another unknown individual living on the outskirts of Boston. Time and choice – these seem to be the most valuable things I know. The direction of life depends upon them, and yet control over them is limited.

So at the end of my first year here, I feel like throwing it all up into the air, just like the first day I arrived in Ponta Verde, when a neighborhood boy (who is now another year older) hid behind some plants as I was walking along a green hillside overlooking the ocean. Jumping out in front of me, he threw two handfuls of brilliant red and orange flower petals high into the sky, and the colors danced about as though on fire and fell into my hair. I resolve to see time like that one moment, a lifetime thrown into the air in a giant heap of wonder. The petals in my hair are the memories kept, like loving keepsakes of time past.

June 22, 2007

Today was Canizade. It is what I would compare to Halloween in the States, and everyone dresses up in costumes with masks, so people don’t know who is hiding beneath the facade of anonymity as they dance, jump out at people on the streets and ask for money from strangers. Walking down the dark cobblestone streets of a back neighborhood, my friends and I huddled together preparing for what reminds me of Knott’s Scary Farm’s costumed employees. They jumped out at us, danced about wildly, played jokes on unsuspecting community members, and harassed people for money. If they were given an American dollar, they would grab the closest costumed monstrosity and dance about in a forced and awkwardly comic way. Most canizades were men, and they wore old women’s dresses with “Scream” masks or hairy wigs. I asked many Cape Verdeans what the point of Canizade is. Does it have a historical origin? Is it related to the upcoming planting season? “It’s a festa,” they say. Yes, but why, I press. “It’s a festa,” they reiterate, stressing the word festa. It is the explanation for any random happening that occurs in my isolated community. With the amount of hard work coupled with lack of entertainment on this island, I am left to assume the whole ordeal was birthed one boring evening as a group of restless Cape Verdeans sat watching flies leap across the walls. “That looks fun, why don’t we do that?” They must have said. So they did.

June 23, 2007

Right now there are two volunteers visiting us from the island of Fogo. There are only five of us here now, as many have already completed their services, or moved onto extended services in other countries, etc. Four of us are in my home and three are in the kitchen sitting on the concrete floor, eating hummus made of chickpeas, discussing politics and drinking white wine out of old peanut butter jars. One is here typing this diary entry. It is interesting to hear the choices of my colleagues whom I have come to admire. They are discussing the workings of Peace Corps, the culture of the country we are experiencing intensely for a short period of time, and relating common stories about international affairs. I find myself silent and contemplating my lack of enthusiasm concerning the topics. After all, I am in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, on a volcanic island, and these fellow PCVs probably have more in common with me than any random individual situated in any part of the world at this moment. And yet I have nothing to say. I feel as though the debates have swum around in my own mind and I am drowning in them. Even as the topics merge from world issues to drugs, I am left amiss, sitting in another room, typing God knows what. I find myself desiring the company of my newly discovered Cape Verdean family. I make a phone call to a friend down the street, seek solace in this new language that brings me comfort. His family is visiting today from the States. His mother and siblings live in Massachusetts (the Cape Verdean Mecca) and he alone is left here. Now they (the PCVs in the next room) are talking about taxis. It reminds me of LA. Which further reminds me of the dona de kaza (the owner of my home) who has recently arrived from America to visit and has been doing construction on our house since she arrived before she returns to the States in July. At some point she will come to live in Cape Verde for good, in this palace-in-the-making. The first time I met this woman, I was sitting serenely on my floor, possibly stretching or doing sit-ups, and she stuck her head into the moonlit window of my bedroom. Unannounced, and quite intrudingly, she proceeded to take control of our lives here and announce that she was going to start working on our house. Large, loud and maddening, she arrives in a thunder every morning at 6 a.m. and the pounding begins. She decided to hire a man up the street to chop down the papaya tree right outside my bedroom window. As I was pulling a pail of water out of our well to bring into the house, down it fell into a cloud of dust below me. I left California’s concrete jungle for this papaya tree, this beautiful world where the land is appreciated for its value, and for the riches it produces. This woman, intruding in manner and impossible in reckoning, calls me Camilla (beyond my own understanding) and chops down the beauty of Cape Verde to insert a concrete walk along the greenery that would be this year during the rainy season. I cried, not only for the fallen tree, but for the contrast between what I have come to love here and for the difference of what is valued in other parts of the world. My everything was traded in for a concrete walk. I guess I am, as my brother has always claimed, a tree hugger.