June 4, 2008

So tired everything looks sick and green like my CreditArgicole bank paper at the bottom of my douche. Like Fary's evil black-toothed voice coming over the millet stalks. Like this one ant running in circles around my rusted tomato paste can. Like Marie brushing my chin after she tries to steal my credit. Using me -but,

How bad does it feel to come home? 10,000 mil on credit, 25,000 mil on ass. 10,000 mil I can give to Lira -why? Because of guilt, because of doe eyes? Because I see something in her I don't in others? Adama and her rough, horrible children.

An undeserved vacation. Trying to serve everyone and didn't serve anyone -including myself. I have to be done. I have lost god's voice again in the world of nit, and he totally goes from me when I don't take care of his vessel. Eating too much, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, running. He'll leave me when I get back on track.

Feeling so bad I shouldn't even write. Its back to that time where the sun's so hot it does freaky things to your body and you don't even own it anymore. Pimples -your skin puffs out -your face swells. I have totally wrecked my body -burned and leathery in the sun -I am starting to get wrinkles...

"The day she told Peace Corps she was leaving she got her period." Me, I am laying in dark spidery room, disoriented as to which way's up, two blinking orange lights. I had it when I lived in the mountains...for no one but myself.

Anyway -I wanted to write about the monkey. The one moment of fuzzy wonderfulness in my day.

After __ left me, down the sand path strut walk with a local -follow charette brief touch on the lips -see you 4th of July. His eyes are -angry or disgusted. He left me in our grass room with a halo of white mosquito net. I went on and dreamed of the misty morning and the coolness -and parting over the water like the time at Winnapesaukee.

But I could not get up. Sleep, when its allowed to fall, and it tries to take its time -falls heavy. I am almost always below the line. Except when I came back from Dakar. I first knew what it meant to be awake and alive here.

I woke up at 10:37. Already, the sun was hot. But with my newly acquired sundress I skipped down to the kayaks like stranded missus -where's my parasol -and finally parted the water with my bough.

Around the bend and my disparate colors bounce awkwardly off the slate blue water and the sky and trees pale with heat. The problem of waccing. I put all my gear in the front of the boat and I slid, muscles contracting, off the rear -longitudinally.

All I ever want is to be suspended in water free from fear. My kayak free on its own -I see dark low long tailed shapes darting, marching through the woods. Monkeys!

I sink in the water -dreads floating like a halo -and swim silently over to the mangrove cove. There I see the monkeys darting and diving, They perhaps all saw me bu mu des benn. He was climbing up the tree foraging and then came down -I was sure he saw me on the decent. But he might not of. He scurried around in other activities before turning to me -black faced -and began calling out in an incredibly loud, not so monkeyish, eerie voice -full of clicks and screeches.

At first I thought it was calling others for food, but none responded and none came. And this call was far too loud. It radiated and echoed and I thought maybe I could ask the campement if they heard it. And I remember Vieux telling me when we were running one day that the birds only screech like that when they've seen another human or a predator -so you can know.

And he was looking right at me. I had trumped him. I had snuck up on him when he didn't know, and he was totally freaked out and warning the others. Maybe it was an ambush! Well, I got to thinking an ambush might be a proper response on their part -monkeys with glaring teeth -and so I started to move quicker out of there -to which he responded even louder -and as I swam to my kayak which had drifted into another cove -he had climbed all the way to the top of the highest tree -a sentinel! to keep watch over me, calling loudly, echoing out and above the other animals.

As I paddled safely back to where he was -he descended the tree and arretted his calls -perhaps thinking he was under attack and running, hiding, or surrendering. Or maybe finally knowing I had come in peace.