I have gained the habit of recording notes to my self, talking about my feelings and thoughts to a self I don’t yet know. Someone who will hear my voice god knows when and god knows where.
Someone who might remember but not necessarily relate to me.

I’ve been coughing this sand ever since I arrived in Mauritania.
Everything filled with these damn dry grains.

I am caressing my dry hands with my dry palms, touch my dry cracked lips with my fingers; eyelids, nosewings, the inside of my nose dry, the windpipe leading to my lungs; everything dry with the sand beating into the pores, nestling in my scalp, inside my mouth, between my teeth: dry, dry.

It is burying me, the desert. Coming over me like a wave, my lone little body helpless in the face of the sand taking over, holding, making me part of it; the sun beating down from above, the wind from the sides, shelterless. It is dragging, relentless;
me into it.

…

Soon a month that I’ve spent here.

My legs and arms tied inside these fabrics shortening my steps, shortening my reach, so clumsy, immobile. They compliment me and tell me I am beautiful and it makes me happy but they can not see the thousands of secrets I am hiding (like how much sinful shoulder-skin I’ve seen and shown in my life just by going to the beach on a summer-Thursday) and so it’s like none of that exists or has existed and I’m not even sure anymore because how many grains of me are blown away with the wind and scattered the moment I turn to look?

I can not see their secrets, either.

Who is fooling,
who is playing who for a fool?
Beneath the kindness calmness patience of the people
I see
the obedient donkeys with their gentle eyes and scars and chunks of their ears missing;
the dogs shying away at the sight of someone picking up a stick;
the children flinching at sudden movements.

Yet I’ve never heard the cries of pain.

For every thing shown to me there are thousands concealed. Secrets folded between layers of silence, malefhas and haulis, eyes watching unflinching, witnessing the mutilations.

I don’t ask. I can not even begin to guess. I have no map for this, can not see this from above. Just dip my hungry paw in the shared bowl offered. Are you kind to me because you truly want to, or because you truly believe that your kindness will reward you with entrance to paradise? Am I your currency? (And is it really relevant to understand the “why”, I mean, no one is less friendly friendly friendly for it. Shut up smile say thank you and lick your fingers, wash your hand.)

…

Sitting like a ball on a rock and hoping no one will come and be friendly to me I long away from here;
I long for Senegal.
I long for Northern spring.
I long for vegan ice cream.
I long for capitals and cars and noise.

I long to dance.

I long for something familiar.
As if any familiarity would help me protect all that I cherish yet need to keep secret here.

…

The Muslims say “allah akhbar” and it means “god is the greatest” and I wholeheartedly agree
although we might mean different things when we say the word “god”.

The electrons making up the atoms making up my cells have the same orbit as do the suns and stars in space.
I know it because I can imagine it.

…

Quietly
I am learning
about longing and silence and kindness and god.

The silence of the desert pushing in from all sides, dense like the air pressure, dense like water, insisting until I can nothing less of merge with it, admit that I am made from the same stuff that I agree to everything stop resisting and go insane by how loud my own footsteps are, how loud the sound of blood the sound of sand rushing in my veins, my own heart’s beat culminating in a roar with all the other noise and it amounts finally to a single pitch
and that pitch
is god.

And I scream, too, inside out in the voice of god and the voice is imperceptible in the silence because the silence is louder and maybe because I actually didn’t scream, made no sound in the infinite unbearable second that passed, didn’t move a muscle.

Do you see me now, god asks, and I close my eyes.

…

I imagine sinking into paradise as my body with a heart that doesn’t beat anymore sinks into the ground and is swallowed by black earth (always Estonian earth; muld, the only one I can imagine) and the insects that live there.
The insects that now scare and disgust me but that will nonetheless eat me eagerly and whose coming I await, equally eager; whose eggs are just waiting to hatch somewhere inside me.
And when the blood has ceased its streaming and the bones are done with their work of staying rigid and upright and the lungs stay still for a moment finally no noise will stand in my way of hearing the absolute orchestra of life around me: the ant steps too quiet to be heard over the sound of my blood pounding in the capillaries; the grains of sand moving in my eyelashes no longer drowned out by the sound of air swooshing inside the lungs.
I will sink into it.
I will submit to it.
And I will be grateful; it will feel like a sigh.

…

But that is then and this is now and even if my mind sometimes wanders
wonders
I feel obliged to
follow the energies, celebrate and acknowledge life, its thousand flows.
Sing praise to it. (My screaming finds melody.)

Dance it.
(My kicking finds rhythm.)

Now I haven’t for a long time, but I’m sure that whenever it happens again (if I don’t die before),
and I wish-
I dream it will,
I hope it will;
I will remember it with ease.

No matter how clumsy I am dressed in these fabrics, no matter how out of balance I feel in this sand sinking away from under my feet, these millions of other wishes and whims ful-filling me now, I will remember and I will smile.

Now that is god.

This feeling that:
that person is also me, yes; standing close and
feeling
the movements of the breath in the chest
the guidance of the hands
small tensions
the movements
of the hips
I could feel (I remember)
his feet through the touch of his ear to mine, I swear
I could feel
light
at that point where
I am
the bone the blood the air; sloshy materials pulsing, leaning into the other; barely contained within skin, barely a barrier;
I am
the point of contact
the bridge
the universe
I am
the nameless space where there is no longer I and not-I but we, us,
me but
with double the body and half of the mind.

That holy point in time,
that feeling:
I see with my eyes closed
our atoms rotating like planets;

now that is god.

…

The limbs tied inside the malefha are going numb from sitting on the rock. I shift painfully. I lick my desert-owned lips and cause more discomfort. The shadow is shrinking rapidly and I need to find other shelter. I finish my note.

The thing you are doing is hard. I know it, because it’s the thing I am doing, it’s the thing I have done. As I close in on the self I see exactly how wide it is. How boundless. How all the lines and categories and rules are just made up and fluid within the infinity of being. Sometimes it scares me, and sometimes it’s sweet; to see it unfold.

…

(This story told in pictures.)