Dear Dakar,
what a rich, rich luxury to wake up to your noise, to the children shouting on the rooftop of the Coranic school across the street, the honking cars, the tailor’s voice and metal scissors clinking as he walks down the street, his sewing machine on the shoulder.

Dear Dakar,
in your dim colored lights I am nothing like the women with the nails and eyelash extensions, hoopy earrings and long long legs in thin high heels that never miss a step, easy, swinging hips. No, my beauty comes from my smile and peace of mind and when I sink into the beat I remember to forget my stumbling steps and to let my heart sink into his, my friend; it’s easy when there is nothing but a cage of ribs or two between our hearts; a few thin layers of cotton, polyester.

Dear Dakar,
you let me fall asleep to the rooster and morning prayer call, smiling on the sheet that has slid off and which I don’t bother to straighten today, either.

Dear Dakar,
your lavish open restaurants with the sea beating in and your loud markets tightening the streets. Your hours of traffic jams and your horses parked in alleyways. Your sand-streets filling up with water and your rhythmic overpasses. Your two hills that you’ve named “the Boobies”.

Dear Dakar,
your colors always bright blue and sandy beige, your eagles hovering in the bleak sky well above the pollution and drooping power lines. The brown curtain always billows into my room.

Dear Dakar,
you are not if not my dearest roommate-sister,

(who moves out of our apartment after having a fight with our landlord but thankfully finds another room just around the corner.)

my grumpy, hectic landlord,

(who rarely smiles or talks to me, but I offer him breakfast once and afterward he asks me if I could make him an omelet every day, please; if I have the time; he will buy the eggs.)

my dance partners,

(all the ones I get to know better and the ones I have never danced with before; all the different ways of being kind with me, of meeting in in that space where no words can describe who I am yet where I am the most.)

my dance coaches and the dance hall,

(where I dance with the doubts radiating into every fingertip, feeling nothing but weak and clumsy and slow yet somehow winning back the strength because no matter how heavy the feeling, I was there; I showed up. I walk home with this heavy feeling, but there are always strangers who, gentle or blatant, take pieces of it into their smiles.)

my neighbors, my French teacher, the boys at the shop downstairs and the mamas across, the groups of people doing sports at night on the boulevard, the taxi drivers forever patient as I practice my speech, the bus boys with their shouts and flower-folded bills, the rooftop and the secrets and the rain beating down from the gutters. The strangers and strangers who come to chat and joke with me, who bring me attention and kindness and sometimes profanities yet always a smile, a flash of white teeth and an invitation to play. Who help me draw lines around my fuzzy egdes

(and at the same time disrupt those very lines as they step inside of my skin and my heart.)

Dear, dear Dakar.

…

(This story told in pictures and video.)