Dad's Heart and Obamacare

(Written the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2010)

This morning, someone I’ve never met cut smoothly into my father’s chest with a scalpel.

He gently (I imagine gently, I hope gently), wrenched my father’s ribs open just enough to reach his topmost artery, the one curled right over his pumping bleeding heart.

When I imagine it, I imagine that there must be blood pooling in my father’s chest cavity. I don’t know if that’s true. I imagine my father pale and small and asleep, not there, gone someplace nowhere.

The cavity in my father’s chest is private, is a secret, is something no one should see, but this man I have never met has seen inside my father’s chest, and he knows if it bleeds.

The artery was, is, hard with fast-setting cement that my father’s body made. It is one hundred percent blocked. That’s what the man I’ve never met said. That’s what the cardiologist said. That’s what my mother said. The man I’ve never met ripped (I don’t know how else you sneak an entire length of vein out of a body. Do you glide it? Do you snip it? How do you keep it intact? How do you keep it strong? How do you how do you how do you? Do you uncurl it?) a vein out of my father’s shoulder and moved it. He moved the vein to my father’s heart. Now it’s an artery. Now it connects directly to my father’s heart. Now my father’s blood bypasses the messed-up cement artery like cars on a brand-new highway.

The only framework I have for imagining this is Grey’s Anatomy, pretty people in tasteful blue scrubs working frantically over my father in just-so light.

I couldn’t go because my mother wanted me to go to my last classes before Thanksgiving. My brother cried and we held each other because our father, our father who has been vegan for six months, our father who has never had high cholesterol, our father who exercises every day, our father who advises doctoral students how to write, our father who is the most optimistic person we know and also the kindest, our father who turned sixty and grew his hair to his shoulders, our father who believes in everyone he meets, our father who could get along with a human snake, our father who always takes the blame when we don’t do our dishes, our father who is the best the best the best the best,

lay on a table this morning gone someplace nowhere and someone I’ve never met gently wrenched his chest open to fix his heart.

Three days ago he went for a checkup and told a nurse practitioner he felt winded lately and that the muscles along his spine between his shoulder blades, his back heart, clenched tight and tense. He trotted on a treadmill with wires taped onto his skin (or maybe the nodes have sticky parts on them already, pads of skin-glue), and the nurse practitioner listened hard to the inside of my father’s body and she sent him the very next day to a cardiologist.

The cardiologist arrowed blue ink through my father’s blood so that it glowed ethereal in his body. And when he looked at my father’s heart squeezing and breathing in my father’s chest he saw in one artery plaque highlighted white and ugly. The other arteries were bigger and thicker than most arteries and they had taken over because their neighbor, the one they’d lived with for a lifetime, was suffocated.

The very following day, today, my father lay on a table and a man I’ve never met cut smoothly into his chest to play musical chairs with veins.

Now my father is okay and sewn up and sleepy and healthy in ICU.

He woke up briefly and told my mother how glad he was the universal health care bill passed.

My father has been working for universal health care, insurance for every person in America, since before Obama came into office. He voted Obama in mainly because of his universal health care plan. My father has always voted but mostly passively. Lately, in his middle age, my father became active. He went to town hall meetings. He put a sign in his yard.

He finally told his conservative friends how he felt about politics, because of universal health care.

I have to say, I took longer to come around. I didn’t opine one way or the other for awhile, because I didn’t understand it. I’m a little ashamed to say but not very, because I’ve observed that few people really understand health insurance in this country or the universal health care bill. I decided not to decide until I gained facts and I was sure.

Then I went to South Africa and I worked in a tuberculosis hospital for people under 3 years old and I held toddlers who clung to me because they didn’t have any parents because their parents, in Limpopo or Durban, died of HIV/AIDS. And I was told these toddlers were lucky because they got into the hospital, which was run by the government and had a decades-long waiting list.

Then I took Global Health, Local Health in the geography department at UT, and Medical Anthropology, and Gender and Health, and I learned about people all around the world rotting from fistulas and selling their organs for food money and dying from HIV not because there’s not medicine, but because they can’t afford it.

And I learned about people in America.

People in America clog up your emergency rooms because they don’t have insurance for a regular checkup.

People in America skip medication and doctor visits for small-time sicknesses because they can’t afford to take a day off work, or two days off work, because their jerk bosses are allowed to fire them for catching a cold. Then these American people develop pneumonia and clog up your emergency rooms, how annoying, because they are trying hard not to die.

People in America feel like their backs are tight and tense, and they feel a little winded.

People in America sometimes go in because they’re worried, even though they can’t afford it, and a nurse practitioner expensively tells them they should go see a cardiologist.

People in America wait until they’ve got some money saved up and then they go see the cardiologist.

If it’s not too late, people in America get blue ink injected into their veins and they see their arteries unpleasantly highlighted with plaque.

People in America sit down hard, and people in America swallow or try to swallow but they can’t because there’s something bulbous in their throats, and people in America wait until they get to their cars to let a whine, a high small noise that sounds like it’s coming from someone else, emit from their vocal folds, and people in America pull over because they can’t see because they’re crying and they can’t figure out how to tell their wives and their children and their best friends that they will go bankrupt because they cannot afford, they simply do not have, the money for a surgery tomorrow, which is when they need it.

And this is what I found, after two years of deep observation and personal exploration:

I believe health is a right, not a privilege.

People seem to be misguided on this. People seem to think that having access to the best health care is a privilege only for somebody who was born in some life that led them to working in a job with benefits and sick leave.

But this is incorrect. I’m happy to point out the mistake.

Health, access to the best health care available, is a right even for people who have applied to ninety jobs in two months without a single interview offer. Health is a right even for people who aren’t white! Health is a right even for women who give birth, and even for women who breastfeed in public. Health is a right even for people who don’t speak English.

Health is a right.

Health is a RIGHT.

We are the luckiest family in the whole world. Only a little more than twelve hours after a cardiologist pointed out the harshly highlighted plaque in my father’s artery, my father was asleep gone someplace nowhere on an operating table while someone I’ve never met cut smoothly into my father’s chest. In six months my father will be healthier than he has been in years, and also he will retain his house and his car and his serenity. My brother and I can keep going to college and my parents can occasionally go camping in Yellowstone and shopping in Santa Fe.

Someone I’ve never met immediately saved my father’s life because my father has insurance.

My father was privileged to be able to claim his right to health.

Thank God. Thank God.

Thanks to my father’s parents for giving birth to him in America. Thanks to my father for working hard and for a university.

Thanks to Obama.

Because now maybe someone else’s father won’t have to cry in his car on the way home as he contemplates how he’ll tell his wife and children and best friends that he will soon be bankrupt, and instead he’ll be like my father is now, okay and sewn up and sleepy and healthy in ICU.

no place but here

I sing it with a broken soul voice.

I put the "m" on the front of "baby" like John Fogherty does, but it's mostly lost to the wind coming in through the windows. Here landscape supposedly flashes past cars like it does everywhere else, but you wouldn't know because the terrain is identical for miles: flat. Wide. Cotton, sometimes maize. A monocrop culture of people who might live in a city and teach at a university but who are only one generation removed from a family farm.

It's three weeks after the puddle jumper landed with a bump on the runway a few miles north of here, and I alighted into a town I've known for eight years. My brother is driving in fast careening curves, my father is in the passenger seat, and I am content in the back, dreaming about the present. We're singing "Suzie Q." We've got some harmony going and the wind participates too.

I have tried to talk but found that people mostly don't want to hear, so I stay quiet.
I have so much to say.

I stay quiet.

I'm more afraid of being home than I ever was of going abroad.
I have known what it is to be the only person you know in a country, and it is a fast addiction, a high I want again.
A freedom.
I have developed more intense relationships with people in days or weeks than I have with most people in the US town where I live in years.
I have talked about HIV/AIDS, about the American education system, about Bosnia, about virginity, about God, about what it means to be alive.
I have danced where I'm not supposed to, with people who didn't think twice about doing the same.
I have swum.
I have seen a sunrise over a field of sunflowers.
I have fallen in love with this whole beautiful planet, which is the same as falling in love with a person.

It loves me back.

Here I stay quiet.

And that is the most terrifying thing I could have imagined, and did not foresee about coming back. If I must remain quiet for fear of offending, of seeming pretentious, of being laughed at, of boring my audience,
will I forget how to live?

And so, for this last entry, I want to speak.
I want to tell you to go barefoot.
I want to tell you to write love letters.
I want to tell you to accidentally-on-purpose leave your cell phone at home every once in awhile.
I want to tell you to sometimes forget about what time it is, and don't look too hard for a clock.
I want to tell you to climb a mountain.
I want to tell you not to be afraid of being alone.
I want to tell you to listen hard to a person who loves her job, even if it's something you would never do.
I want to tell you to listen hard to anyone who loves anything.
I want to tell you not to laugh when someone suggests doing something out of the ordinary, and even to do it.

Fall in love all over again with your parcel of this beautiful planet.

Even if it's alone, do something extraordinary.

So now I'm home, in my favorite country in the world, singing Creedence Clearwater Revival at the top of my lungs with two people I love. I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't care much. I am no place but here, and that's the only place I'll ever be.

down the rabbit hole

Last night Heather and I left our hostel and wandered around the block in search of food. We entered the first restaurant we happened upon, and when we were handed menus by the waiter whose first language I could not speak, I flipped through in numb confusion.

Kebaps. Lamb. Beef. Gyros.

What country was I in?

There was a moment when I honestly could not remember.

I looked around me for clues. There on the wall was an engraving of a mosque with six minarets that looked suspiciously like the Blue Mosque.

Turkey, then.

No. We left there ages ago. I was tired from little sleep and a long bumpy bus ride, but surely I could remember where I was.

Austria. Vienna. I was in a Turkish restaurant in Vienna. The waiter spoke German.

Since leaving Cape Town, I have been in nine countries. European cities are old and beautiful, with extremely old churches and museums that hold things you studied back in middle school. But after so many cities with so many holy spaces and outrageously gorgeous gold or marble or painted decoration and cobblestone streets and languages that you don't speak and bizarre, jilting, rolling, long train rides and bus rides that you try so hard not to sleep through for missing the countryside but end up waking up four hours later when a Croatian turns on the light in your berth to inform you he needs your passport, NOW, or that's what you think he says because it's in Croatian and he seems bossy and official and he's got some kind of enormous black stamping mechanism, you fumble through your bag and you don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's amazing and you're learning so much, but you're a little exhausted and you want to stay put in one place long enough to maybe learn some of their language or watch the sunflowers turn their heads.

I wrote this journal entry on the train ride into Serbia from Bulgaria:

I find myself in a train compartment, and books come to mind, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, trains full of people going to some grotesque party I am not privy to,
Heather says they're gypsies.
But here I sit and across from me are three women tumbled atop one another, speaking a language I do not understand, they don't understand mine either, so we sit and they talk about me and I talk about them, they smoke cigarettes and have husky middle-aged voices and blonde hair, black hair, cleavage, like Dallas people but something different.
People everywhere gypsies.

Part of the appeal and the confusion and the adventure of this trip is the overwhelming bizarreness, the incessant shifting, the suspension of reality.

I am Alice.

Philosophy regarding a Turkish commode

"I can hold it," Laura announces, sliding defeatedly into her rickety plastic chair. "It's Turkish."

We are at a bus terminal in Athens waiting for transport to Delphi, and Laura has
"just paid fifty cents to not use the bathroom." I have two bottles of water and a cup of coffee in me, and a forthcoming 3-hour bus ride. I decide to take my chances.

I hand the woman manning a table before a door labeled "W.C." fifty (euro) cents, and pass her, focused on entering the dark watery beyond. "Wait," she calls after me. I turn. "Paper?" She holds up a generous portion of toilet paper, and I accept it, smiling.

Then turn back to my fate.

I open the stall door to find a Turkish commode: two rippled foot ledges bordering a porcelain funnel which disappears into a dark hole.

Like peeing in the woods, I decide a moment later. Except with a convenient sink and soap. Cleaner, in fact, than the U.S. and English version of toilets, given that you don't touch anything. It even flushes.

This is something I have learned from being abroad: difference is not scary. When you need to pee and there's a hole but no place to sit, this is not scary, it's just different. When you need to eat but no one speaks your language so you don't know exactly what's in that pie you're getting, this is not scary, it's just different.

When facebook changes its layout, this is not scary. It's just different.

Ultimately, if you have a safe, cleanish place to sleep, and you're getting fed somehow, and there is a place to relieve yourself, and your friends are still alive and human regardless of how you connect with them, life is okay. Things come in different forms, but life is okay.

When you realize that, you are not only a successful Buddhist, but you are a happy happy person.

It's a sweet kind of liberation.


Snapshot:
You stand on an uneven rock before an enormous, weathered, ivory-colored pillared building, and the sun hits the top of your head with fiery effectiveness. You're thinking about cataracts, about peeling skin, about a hat, about the accoutrements you wish you had now, and then you stop, and you just are, you and the Parthenon, and you are full of shame because you are here but you don't know about columns or Athena really or old politics but you're here and someone else is not.

So you study it and catalog details so that when you do learn, you remember.


Snapshot:
The ferry is disappointingly enclosed so you press your nose against the glass and watch the spray strain to reach it. When the dock collides with the boat, you bound out, onto land, you breathe. The old Greek man with weathered skin twinkles at you and directs you down the road, there's a beach there, maybe some tourists but mostly not, and so the three of you walk, the soft sea on one side and the Mediterranean rock and brush on the other, glaring at you kindly, and the only people who pass are brown boys on motorbikes, black hair blue eyes, they look at you with mild curiosity and then they are gone. When you reach the beach you shed your towel, your clothes, and you slide into the water and it's the warmest saltiest smoothest clearest water you've ever seen and now you are in, it's effortless, it's like coming home, the oldness goes and you feel new.

Snapshot:
The center of the world.

Snapshot:
Istanbul. It's Laura's birthday so Ali the hostel-owner buys her a cake and all the hostel sings happy birthday, and then crosses the bridge for drinks, are we going to Asia? And after it's over you walk over uneven slate cobblestones to the sea, it's almost sunrise, there are enormous blocks of rock barricading the sea from the road and the city, and first Alex and Mikel remove their shirts and their shoes and their pants, and then Xabi, and then Heather goes, and you and Laura, and with a shivery splash you're in the sea, very different from Greece but there's the saffron sun, exhilaration, good morning Istanbul!

Snapshot:
You're barefoot, your sandals are in your purse, you fumble with a blue cloth big enough to use as as a toga should you so choose, and finally you turn and ask the guard--"No problem! I show you--here." He throws it over your shoulders, covering the skin of your arms, and you gesture at your hair, shouldn't you cover that? He waves his hands, smiles, "Okay." And gestures you inside.

You enter your first mosque. There's the enormous open space, the dome above. There's the pious man praying, up and down, murmuring in another language. There's the low wooden fence separating you, the nonbeliever, from them, the believers. There's the screened alcove behind you where the women go.

Here you are, in the Blue Mosque, and for the past two days you have not been anonymous, you have been white, you have been English-speaking, you have had blonde hair and blue eyes

and you have had a vagina without accompanying hijab.

Men undress you with their eyes on the street.

At first it was cheesily charming,
"Did you drop down from heaven?"

Then it was funny,
"Hello, Spice Girls. Can I hassle you?"

Then, it was
"You have beautiful lips. Come kiss me with them."

too
"Gorgeous chicks."

much.
Always.
You walk on the sidewalk and they want to sell you something, or they don't, but they talk to you, the men, always men, and sometimes, sometimes, you want your body, your eyes, your lips, to not be remarked upon, because somehow the remarking makes them, your body, your eyes, your lips, belong not to you but in small part to the remarker, and after three days of remarks none of it is yours anymore.

So you stand in that mosque and you look at the women's section and you remind yourself not to be imperialistic, not to be a judging outsider, but you stand there and you look at the women mysterious in their screened piety and you are angry.

What is this society, that is so afraid of women?

Cover them up.

If a Turkish man sees a woman he has to remark, to sexually taunt, he cannot let her be because that is allowing her to be herself and that is a terrifying kind of power.


For a week in Istanbul not a single Turkish woman spoke to me. Anytime I bought a ticket, or a sandwich, it was a man on the other side of the counter. And they didn't let me live separate from my gender.

This, I find, is what it means to be weary.

I do not know what progress means.
So I define it myself.
Progress is not machines.
Progress is not English.
Progress is not Christianity.
Progress is not Western.

Progress is the antithesis of this soul weariness.
Progress is a society that allows everyone to grow.
Progress is freedom which is truly for everyone.

This has little to do with government or religion.

According to the government of Turkey, I am free to walk down the street in any clothes.
According to me, I am not.

There is a lack of freedom in the United States too.
A discrepancy.
If we are all free, if no group subjugates another, why is there rape?


Last Snapshot:
The most beautiful building in the world.
I have not been in all the buildings in all the world, but I know that nothing, nothing, could ever be more sacredly beautiful than this.
The Hagia Sophia.
A cathedral and then a mosque and now a museum. Mixed on the walls are murals of Christ and motifs of Islam. The ceiling goes up longer than you thought any ceiling could, and every corner, dome, rise, is painted with the kind of old art you see in textbooks.
You forgot your language, and it doesn't matter, because no matter what war we're fighting or what religion is currently all the rage, this is a sacred place.
For you.
For everyone.

London bridge hath fallen down: a day in between

Twelve hours after leaving Cape Town on Friday the twelfth, our plane lands in London. I hug Brian and others goodbye for the last time, and while they hurry away toward their gates which are their portal to America, I make my way leisurely to the baggage claim.

I'm about to make my solo debut into Europe.

I miss Cape Town, I miss my friends there, the death of my life there; I am so full of reaction to the irretrievable nature of life that I cannot pick apart emotions and examine them. Rather, they exist all together in my body, somewhere near my intestines or my heart or the constricted balloons of my lungs or my soul, they're all the same and filling me up, and it's been so long since I've last slept that my body cannot cope.

Yet I find myself alone in a strange country, with no clock and no rules.

Cue mischievous grin.

I retrieve my luggage and roll clunkily into the women's toilet near customs. I brush my teeth. I change into the brightest summeriest skirt I own. I wash my face. I brush my hair. I get strange looks from the pregnant Czech woman manning the bathroom.

Clearly, if I'm going to be in Europe for the first time, I have to look good. This is my wall against the world, my protection, my unofficial passport.

I take the Tube into central London and emerge into the city without a hitch. It's 8 a.m. and I am high on the fact of being someplace I have never been before; it's a joy like none other, one to which I am fast becoming addicted. It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and everyone I pass on the street looks glum. They look at me curiously, taking second glances, and it's because I'm wearing a summery skirt on a cloudy morning, it's because I am buoyant in my walk, it's because I nod at them which they do not do to one another, it's because (I surmise), at this moment, I am pretty and happy and the bouncing personification of life.

It is the most freeing thing in the world to be the only person you know in a whole country.

I get mildly lost looking for my hostel and so clunk into a hotel several light-years above my budget to ask the German behind the counter where my street is. He smiles at me, shows me on the map, and sends me on my way. I find it, drop off my luggage, and ask directions to Westminster Abbey.

I walk, and accidentally-on-purpose lose myself again. I don't mind; this part of London is clean and prosperous. Londoners are awakening and opening shops, and tourists are marching purposefully through the streets toward some common goal. (I am reminded of the Pied Piper.)

I notice ahead of me a blonde, middle-aged couple; the man has socks with sandals and a heavy black Canon with about 35 lenses dangling around his neck. I focus on it in shock.

Won't it get stolen?

Good God, we're not in Cape Town anymore. I haven't been asked for money once. No one has solicited me for sex or any other dubious purpose. No one has tried to sell me "ethnic" goods.

On the contrary, most people are white. Most people have expensive haircuts and artfully cheap-looking expensive clothes. A man passes me in the opposite direction, his jeans razored beautifully and falling exactly tightly enough over his hips, his goatee perfect. I catch part of his sentence as he barks into a silver cell phone with no buttons: "...possible to meet at quarter past..." I blink after him. What an idiot. Everyone knows you have to find a non-sketchy shop to go into if you want to talk on your cell phone in public. If you even leave home with it at all, which I rarely did in Cape Town.

But this place is different.

You can dangle your $2,000 camera nonchalantly around your neck. You can talk on your several-hundred-dollar Blackberry on the sidewalk. I don't see anyone who is even below middle class. If you go by exchange rates, I'm in the wealthiest country in the world, and I can take pictures in public without a care in the world.

An enormous weight lifts from me, and I wave it goodbye cheerfully.

I have made it to Fleet Street, which does not look at all like a place Sweeney Todd would inhabit, and wonder where the hell the Thames is. I jingle into a tiny law bookshop (est. 1700s) and ask the man behind the counter, a (suspected) grad student with long hair and an eyebrow ring. He shrugs easily and directs me nicely back the way I've come; apparently I've made a wrong turn.

I find the Thames and take my first picture.



Then, crossing the bridge and thunking down the steps, I am distracted by a used book market under the bridge run by a friendy mom-and-pop team. I choose a book (A History of Tractors in Ukrainian), pay my four pounds, and set off. To my left is a rolling cement landscape of graffiti'd wilderness; teenage boys with neon trick bikes and skateboards (or longboards, or J-boards, or whatever) roll almost upside-down before swooping to the other side. To my right, kids take turns flipping backwards off the stairs onto the grimy Thames sand below.

The city is a playground on a sunny June Saturday. How fabulous.

I make my way at last to Westminster, stopping only for sustenance and pictures, and ease into St. Margeret's with peace.

This right now right here is why I love being alone in a new city sometimes.

If you have never been alone in a strange beautiful cathedral, GO.

I slide into a pew in one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world and there are dead bishops, bodies of clergymen that were dust before the printing press. There are candles lit by pilgrims for people who are dying, people who are living, people who are deciding, people who are leading countries and people who are being born. There is furniture the function of which I cannot determine. There are carvings and there is stained glass and there is an enormous soaring ceiling and embroidered knee pillows. There are tourists murmuring, separated or maybe affected.

There is me.

I am there but I forget, I don't exist anymore, there is something mystical, I am allowed when I am alone in a strange city to be the least lonely I have ever been in my life, the most hopeful, the happiest.

There is no such thing as a perfect life, never, and there are things wrong with mine, but at this moment, right now, I am fulfilling my potential, and that is all I ever need.

So I sit there and I look into the mystic and it looks back.

And then I nod and I stand and I take a breath and I walk out the door.

Westminster Abbey has a lot of graves. There are dead people everywhere, marble pious hands, demure holy faces, un-relaxed sleeping sculptured people, wooden people, painted people, faceless people, flowered people, people who have no likeness or words but just a name cut into a coffin-sized marble tile:

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN.

Queen Elizabeth I with her ridiculous collar which attaches itself to her even (or especially?) in death, and opposite her Mary Queen of Scots, whose execution Elizabeth ordered. There are choir rooms and altars and cloisters and temples, all magnificent, all unbelievable in their architecture and expensive detail.

My breath skips when I see the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. Then there is Alfred Tennyson, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and an unholy altar, a veritable shrine, when I reach William Shakespeare.

I meander into the College Gardens, pausing to receive some strange looks when I refill my water bottle in the loo, and find the Rose Garden.

This is what this day is about: the difference between that sweet light intoxicating smell, and the other deeper spicier one. The first is pink with wide traditional petals, the other darker, closer to a sun shape, with smaller, more numerous petals.

Today, I am alone in London, and I smell the hell out of those roses.

Their scent remains with me still.

I leave happy and with no plan.

I walk along streets, vaguely back to my hostel but mostly just toward whatever seems interesting. I see a circle of blacks wearing black, green, and yellow colors singing familiar-sounding music. I stop on the fringe of the circle, the only white person. "'Ello, gorgeous!" There is a table with flyers, and the man behind it, about my age with dreads, hands me one. We are outside the Zimbabwean Embassy, and they are promoting a petition against Robert Mugabe and for fairer elections in Zim. I immediately sign it.

Next to occur before me is Trafalgar Square, which I have heard of but to my shame do not know why. There is an enormous phallic tower with some kind of bronze figure mounted atop it, high over the surrounding official-looking buildings. (With a jolt I see the South African Embassy.) Surrounding it is a fountain and the National Gallery and a mix of tourists and people promoting some kind of cause--in an effort to read the sign I bump into a kindly-looking middle-aged woman, who hands me a flyer. "There you go, love," she says, smiling. It reads, "DARWIN WAS WRONG." A man climbs unsteadily on top of one of the enormous lions guarding the penile monument and reveals a megaphone. "In the modern world," he intones, "we have moved away from the Lord..."





After consulting the map, I meander onwards. I briefly pop into the British Museum and consider Virginia Woolf's brain as I search for the elusive Reading Room. When it closes at 5:30, I purchase a salad from a Romanian woman in a shop, then make my way to one of the ubiquitous parks in this part of London. I sit on the grass and watch: the couple in front of me is slightly nerdy but undeniably in love, the two girls at the far side pick at a guitar ambitiously, the hipster near me is sitting against a tree quietly, the fashionable father kicks a soccer ball to his two young sons, the thirty-five year-old daughter pushes her mother in a wheelchair along the sidewalk.

I have become so used to being another country that London, as a major city in an English-speaking, powerful Western/Northern country, seems like home. It's a perfect break between South Africa and eastern Europe, the beautiful beginning to a backpacking trip through Europe that I can't wholly predict.

Tomorrow is Greece.

Dear South Africa

Dear South Africa,

I wish there was some way I could say it to you.
Say back to you what you've given to me.
But at some point,
when you peel away the tissue
to something deeper,
something so internal you can't feel it except dully,
achingly,
you learn

that there are no words.

So I write this because I don't know anything else,
it's the only thing I can give you,
the only thing I have that I can give, and
I need to tell you,

you humbled me.

I came with my prejudices,
my sophomoric assurance of self-knowledge,
did you know
that I knew everything?

I'm leaving now
after you gave me the dubious gift
of finding
that I know nothing at all.

I went to the high school to teach kids how to debate.
I am inadequate.

I went to the TB hospital to give affection to kids.
They taught me how.

I became surrounded by people who speak more than English.
I only know one language.

There are tag words:
colour.
American.
parliament.
girl.
black, xenophobic, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesothu, Swazi.
Afrikaner.
Apartheid.
racist. sexist.
sexual harrassment, fear, poverty, unemployment, robbery, kidnapping, rape, township, Group Areas Act, white.
Table Mountain.

Once a group of South Africans sang me an impromptu national anthem.

It is difficult,
I have found,
when you love the whole world.

Where do you fit?
As an individual.
I am small,
I am miniscule,
a dot on the face of our big granite Earth,
a flick in time.

We have to categorize to make things fall into comprehension.

The more I learn,
the fewer categories I can endorse.
Thus,
the world loses comprehension...

So here I am
deep in the aching tissue
where the world is
where you are
where I am
and where words can't go.

Thank you for the trip.

I can't claim you for my own,
and so I don't know how to love you
but I do.

I do.
And I always will.

about the blog: a letter to you

I want to be your translator.

I want to tell you about you, translated from another language.

I started a blog because I wanted you to know what it's like to be a body in South Africa. I wanted you to know what it's like to be you in South Africa. I wanted you to be any body or your body or my body in South Africa, in that van with me, feeling that man's head roll hard and round across my knees. I wanted you to wake up in my bed alone, hear the buses roll past outside. I wanted you to bite into a sweet bursting grape, taste the ambrosia in your mouth, on your tongue, feel vaguely worried as you read that you might drip juice down your chin and onto your shirt.

I came to South Africa because there was something I suspected, and I wanted to prove it to myself.

I suspected that there is no such thing as a real world. There is only such thing as many real worlds, as many as there are people. There is no actuality, no reality. The only thing Africa is, the only thing it ever ever was, was what people saw tasted felt heard breathed it to be. That is Africa. It does not exist in the back of your head, in the corner of your eye, just beyond your reach, just behind your vision. It exists here, in this blog, in what you're reading. It exists in anything you've ever heard about Africa, anything you've ever tasted in Africa. My Africa is real and different from that of the man who robbed me, they are so so different, and different from Carmen's and different from Funeka's and different from Kcowane's Africa, but they are all Africa, they are all real in our heads. You can be from Oceanview or you can be from Namibia or you can be from Norway.

You can be from Lubbock, Texas.

The Africa in our heads is real and it is the real Africa, and the public sphere of Africa is people communicating what is in their heads, that is the only way to know the real Africa, what people say, what they say in their bodies and in their words, that's the only real way to communicate is through bodies and words, and since you cannot see my body or feel my skin or the soft compression of my fingers on yours, and you cannot taste it or hear me or smell me, we can't communicate that way, it's out, so the only way to communicate, you and me, America and Africa, is through words.

I couldn't lie to you.

I couldn't tell you untruths. I wanted to contribute something new, something you did not know. I could have added high fructose corn syrup and wrapped it in cellophane.

But you don't need to go to South Africa for that.

I wanted honesty. I wanted rawness. So I talked about fruit and its sweetness but I also talked about his long lashes, the fear and the seahorse, but mostly you were in my white female young American body, I didn't pretend to be anyone else, I didn't try to be the whole public or the whole Africa or to tell you that this is what Africa is to everyone,

I just wanted you to know what Africa was to me.

And I think since you know what it is to me, you maybe know better what it is to you too.

I am small, I am one human being and I am in South Africa and these are my experiences, only mine but if you want you can apply them to you or anyone else, that's what they're there for, that's what stories are for.

I want to be your translator.