Dear Sierra Leone, Part One

 

His face glowed so much there, in the WhatsApp pictures. I didn’t realize he was homesick ALL the time until, for twelve days, he wasn’t. Of all the empathies that came and went and landed or exploded between us, I wish I’d done this one more: Homesick boy. The fishermen pulling in their morning catch. Salone. Salone.

I didn’t know I could have travel compersion, but there it was, there he was. On his own, so maybe he felt a little bit more mine than when he was at home. Or maybe his lightness of heart was my lightness too, maybe we were both shining with you. Maybe we were hibiscus blooms in the dead of winter. Maybe I caught his tropical relief.

On his own, on three-wheeled motorbike cabs, or riskful and free on the back of the motorcycle taxis. (How could you ride one of those without snuggling into the guy’s back? But he wouldn’t have.)

And the beach. Second beach or second river and I didn’t ask where’s the first beach or the first river, but I did understand pink sky. The boyish sunset glint in someone so serious, so often downcast here with me.

Sierra Leone, I don’t exist there, nor should I. But also, I wanted to. And also, I should. Those wedding parades with their bright family-matched fabrics, their brass bands, their waiting outside for the aunties’ permission, where do queer lives go for their belonging? It wasn’t my place to ask but I did of course eventually. In his family, they go to straight marriages, they pretend. Like my own family, maybe everybody’s for most of history, they erect an architecture of lies as old as colonialism—be straight, be normal, be real.

There’s no way out of it. It’s his way to be real.

He told me he wanted to bring me to you someday. “Sure,” I said, “You can be like, mom, this is my girlfriend.”

“And then she’ll fight you.” He said.

“At least I’ll get to meet her,” I said.

I could have avoided it, I guess. The closet, the little humiliations. Becoming an object of fear, both rightfully and not. But then I would’ve missed you, and not known that I’d missed you, and we’d never have had (and not had) New Years together.

Oh my love, a place I’ll never visit. A place I’ll always.