the girl from Dakoro

There's a large whiteboard behind me covered

in words like tryptophan and heme and catecholamines

in red and green and blue and black, my color-system way to keep them

organized concretely, and preserve that order in the abstract of my mind

because they get so tangled up in there with all the other things I’ve known.

Outside the window to my left are palm fronds flickering with sunlight

and an airplane sparking like a slowly-falling star against

the bright blue skies of day, and softly but relentlessly,

the clock propped on the desk is ticking, ticking seconds by.

This day feels like days I lived long ago – the warmth and brightness

and the ticking clock like heartbeat mooring my fact-swamped mind –

Dakoro days when I was back in high school at the kitchen table,

or Maradi afternoons or Galmi’s stilled siesta hours,

when we played under the neem trees while the sunlight dripped

between the branches, dappling pictures I drew in the sand. My writing

on the whiteboard hasn’t changed – it looks the same as when I wrote

my stories in the dust and all my arrows between concepts are

just like the ones in my small maps. This life I’m living isn’t

like the ones I dreamed back then; oceans of water and of self

keep widening, it seems, between my childhood home and I.

Home until I was 18

And suddenly the stakes of next week’s test feel very small and

all these things I’ve longed to learn feel like accessories to my true core.

I sit down, tired of writing Greek and Latin words turned science, tired

of learning and re-learning, tired of packing up over and over, tired

of one new home after another, tired of building this unforeseen life.

I want to sit down at my table in my childhood home

and watch the breeze play with the leaves of all my childhood trees –

are they still there? Taller or pruned short? How were the rains this year? –

I want to scuff my flipflops out the door and sit down by the porch –

is it still there, the porch my father built, the center of my long-gone world? –

I want to hear the neighbors’ voices up and down my childhood street –

I wonder if they’d recognize me or be proud to see who I became –

and draw lines in the sand with sticks. Draw them between these words

I love now and across these maps of what I’ve learned in med school,

nursing, immigration, life not being what I thought it would be

'til they mesh together all the things I’ve ever known

or craved or hoped to understand and all the names I’ve answered to. 

I want the things I loved once, love now to come together and belong.

I need to know this girl I’m creating from the patchwork of experience

and inborn hunger is still the one I used to be, I need to know

she’s not a stranger to the dreams I used to dream or the world

I used to live in or the stories I once told. I need to know

I’m still the girl from Dakoro.

Friends and 14 year old me (and small sister creepin')