where my heart is right now

a story to go with the rearrangement of this space

*welcome to night log, where I listen to myself and you can eavesdrop, if you are attentive and kind. the night log is left open until dawn.*

Mozambique 2009. picture by Maggie Himsel

You go to a place you’ve been before.

You don’t think of it often but it is because you cannot find it again. Belonging is a word you’ve forgotten by now, numb to the -longing of it. You’ve learned to just be. You don’t like it, but it is what you have.

It is a bonfire on a beach, flames on the oceans edge. The Indian Ocean - across the channel from Madagascar. On the coast of Mozambique, where the sand is bone-white, and the crabs are bone-white, and the Milky Way splatters across the sky and phosphorus sparks in the deep teal water after dark.

We all met there, on the edge. Piled on logs. Roasted sweet potatoes in the coals.

We were wet with salt. With the long white hours, racing on the seaweed ribboned sand. I had run many miles one direction, past men in torn trousers hauling in nets. Past smoke-colored shells, gritty like gravel. Across estuaries hot with movement. 

When I returned there were races. We didn’t speak the language. We just ran, hair wet and stuck to our necks. lines in the sand that no one heeded.

Earlier that day we had sung, lungs full of harmony, in a chapel on the edge of the sea. It had echoed like a drum. (I have a blog with pictures and sounds, somewhere, but I can’t find the name of it, so I can’t find it.)

The night before we had piled in the back of a pickup. Let the wind take our capulanas to the edge of the sea, where a broken town lived. 

It was so alive. The well, it was right on the edge of the sea. It was shallow and wide. 

We had woken to the huge spilt sun, in hammocks along the bungalows. We had run down to the beach, we had drunk coffee on the driftwood logs. We had watched her black hair bob, ten feet out. 

Now, the flare of night, of charcoal, of fragrant coals. We picked the sweet potatoes in our fingers. We practiced the songs we knew.

I had walked out into the water with several other women. We had let the night sink green around us. I found myself alone for a moment. We had tried snorkeling earlier that day but the sea was too choppy. The sky stretched thin with fog, with the shadows of stars. I could feel the green depths. I could hear the rocking of a ship.

Something was returned to me that moment —a memory of who I was. It came in fragments like pebbles. Of old and silly stories, garnished by colonialism. My task was to pull back those veils, after that. ships that had other tasks — trickster tasks, into the cracks, as Bayo Akomolafe says, a memory of myself I still do not remember fully. but she is needed — that much I knew.

(I found her again later, years later, in a song by Gregory Alan Isakov, given to me by a lover before he was a lover and before he was a danger both:)

maria's got wings, she's got legs for the sea
a captain's coat and a note for me
wake up Marie, before the season turns
set your dash for the coast, watch the Sangres burn

But that fire—that’s where you are now. 

the sangres / photo by Jay Gannett

If you were your full self, you’d probably overtake him, said a friend, who called me one night in November —the night before it happened — with an unexpected prophesy. With memories of my childhood — of places my psyche had been stuck.
Meanwhile I’d found myself drawn to flame. I had lit candles, turned on my fake fireplace, built a real one, close to heat, wanting the red dance. 

You’d burn him up, she said.

I was still drawn to flame the next day, he walked in, his face cold. He walked in with held secrets that he dumped over me like a bucket of cold water. Like a lead blanket. Even then, I was holding a lit candle. Picturing a fire roaring in my heart. It was a shield of fire.

Even with that protection, I found myself crouched in a small dark space—so so alone. Feet lined with metal. Face bone-white, leeched of color. Not again. Not again.

Where are you?

I asked this question for so long. I ask it every day. I ask it to myself every day for weeks. Ask other people, echolocate myself in their answers, bounce them off of my own inner ear.

Looks like something is about to burn, said Laura Geiger, when I told her about the hole lined with metal. It wasn’t the first one I’d been stuck in. Labrynths cages caves - I had memories of all of them.

memories of things that were not my timeline. memories stacked up in my body. what is your body here for? what is your psyche here for? (they are here for different things?)

You were meant to carry things. Latent things. Like seeds, like talismans — you travel fast, you travel between worlds. you navigate quiet and clean.

for others. but what about for yourself?

You try every way to get out, and nothing works. You try to dig your way out. You try to move the blanket of lead, but outside in the darkness, there are no hands reaching for you, even though there are hands. If the hands aren’t reaching for you, they are laughing at you, you realize. they want you to suffer. at the very least, they don’t want to worry about you. You don’t want to go out there.

She is so so young but she is also so right. We forget that wisdom is not just the wisdom of ages. Sometimes wisdom is the exact size and age in the shape of the part of you stuck in a hole.

She is 12 or 13 years old. She is exactly as wise as her years. You might listen to her now.

Go back go back to the moment you went cold. What happened before? she says.

I was on fire, I said. 

I was burning like Joan of Arc.

fisheaters.com

*if you’re listening in, drop your field notes below. what age did you ignore the wisdom of your years?