must've gotten lost....

i'm not sure what started it tonight. but whatever it was, it was deep, and dark, and cold. 

i am here. and you are there. and we are not in that other there any longer. and tonight, i just can't do it here. it seems as if i either need to be there with you or there with him, that boy on that street up from the train station in kigoma, tanzania whose head was torn and broken. fingers chopped. hair burned. ear torn half away. shoes with holes and big enough for my feet. swallowed his stunted feet. his stunted feet at the bottom of bony knees visible through holes. 

he looked. up at me with large eyes as my fingers opened with the twenty bob piece falling through the gaps into his open palm. two cents here. all i had though. and somehow he knew that. and turned his eyes upward at me with tears that said asante sana, mzungu. it was good. true. real. 

and right now here, this here without you, doesn't feel real. tonight, i just can't. i can't open up books. wade through a drama in spanish about the women's place in nineteenth century spain. write a graph about the changing ecological community of red maples taking over red oaks. sift through ancient words about erotic love in the symposium. i just can't. can't learn from those books when all i want to do is live brutally and truly.

 i'm sorry that tonight they are making me mad with their good voices and perfect hair and beautiful clothes up on this mountain in this bubble. i'm just having trouble loving them because i must be prideful enough to think that i've seen it all. the world out there and somehow that makes me over them or better or older. i just want them to see it and truly try to live too. so i just can't do it tonight. the books. be amongst them, silent and burning inside.

not with the fact that those 35,000 children died today. unnecessarily.  and we could have done something about it. with our medicines, money, and technology. but we didn't. and i didn't. 

so i wish you and i were there. because that was right, then. on that island in the wind that you said shook us out of something or shook something out of us. with the white waves and dark clouds. and five months of what felt like life. 

it's killing me right now. but maybe tomorrow you and i will both remember that light on the water we saw from above that night. and then love someone in our respective here into life. because for now, that will have to be enough. because it's all that i've got. 

and to him, tell him i'm coming back. i'm trying to. as soon as i can. i hope to see him soon. with you in the wind and the color and the adventure and the life.