Hands Away

A few days after leaving Liberia, I stopped crying long enough to visit a museum. In it was a piece called The Acquired Inability to Escape. I couldn't move away from the thing: I swear it was speaking to me.

A few days earlier, you see, during a layover in Brussels, I'd watched the strangest thing. A little boy stood on the outside of a moving walkway and, for no apparent reason, put his fingers on the handrail, forcing the boy to run alongside the moving walkway as the handrail dragged him with it. He screamed, but still he held on. And when his mother cried, "Just let go!" he seemed more afraid to do so than to see where the handrail took him.

When, at last, he did let go, he stood, shocked, stared at his hand and burst into tears.

This is how it felt to leave Liberia.

Liberia is all the things I never wrote about. I considered listing them here but decided to give you a reason to visit -- and give myself a reason to go back. With kids. I'll show them where to crumble crackers for sacred catfish, what to do while the bank teller flosses with Scotch tape, how to chug a hot Club Beer on a rainy beach. And when these kids have finally wrapped their heads around this place, we'll head to the airport and I'll say, "Just let go." They will look incredulously at me. And I will smile, knowing exactly how they feel.

Thank you so much for reading.

FIN

Swish

Once upon a time, when I first moved to Liberia, someone back home asked me how it was that I so gracefully orchestrated the ends of my flings.

"I've got a fadeaway jumpshot," I said.
"A WHAT!?"

It wasn't that the person I was speaking to didn't know what I was talking about; it was that he had no idea how I knew what I was talking about. (I cannot bring myself to watch sports, effectively making me the worst tomboy anywhere on Earth.)

My fadeaway jumpshot revealed itself again last night when I walked into a house party. I'd barely closed the door behind me when this fantastic stranger came over and asked, "Do you write a blog?"

Fear | Panic | Horror

"....Yes?"

"Oh my god. My sister's going to die. She's in the States. She loves you. Can I take your picture? I'm taking your picture." 

The three friends I'd walked in with exchanged a look that said, "How is this even happening -- Avril is the least cool person we know." 

I'm not going to lie: I am a magnet for unlikely experiences, but this? This was a moment. 

Allow me to set the stage: I'd just left my own going-away thing, dotted in tears, full of injera and regrets. I was in a dress gifted to me by the woman I thought would be my mother-in-law. My house has silent spaces in it where furniture and photos used to be. I was in no position to be sociable last night: I just wanted to control time -- fast-forward it, rewind it, pause it, anything. I had become obsessed with all the things I didn't get to do in Liberia, the things I'd taken for granted or said (or never said). I wondered why I'd put so much of myself into this blog only to leave Liberia feeling...unfinished. 

But then...the house party. And the girl. And the acceptance that I'm backing away from this country. And the knowledge I did something really dope while I was here. 

This is me, sinking the ball while moving away from the basket. 

Loverboy

There is a terrible song I never cared for until I woke up singing it today. The chorus is as follows:

Everybody's workin' for the weekend
Everybody wants a new romance
Everybody's goin' off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance

These lyrics take on an entirely different meaning when you live in Liberia where, at the end of a workweek, everyone expects their Friday. "Where my Friday?" you will hear from guards and porters and gardeners and, sometimes, strangers. Friday is the extra dollar your boss-man or boss-lady gives you for, like, doing your job. ("Where my _____?" is also heard all weekend-long and around Independence Day, Christmas and New Year's.)

For the record, I do not subscribe to Fridays or weekends because, seriously, where is my bonus for making it through a workweek? One Monday, I was asked in front of 15 people to tighten and brighten my work attire to impress visiting guests. Twice in the same week, I was forced to sing duets aloud for walking into all-staff meetings after silent prayer. Once, at 8 in the morning, a man had the nerve to say, "Avril, you're adding up! Don't deny yourself." Kids, this means: "Damn, girl, you are looking extra fleshy today. Keep it up." Last week, I almost threw down with two enraged motorbikers as I made an unprecedented U-turn on Old Road. And Tuesday evening, already late, I found myself playing sweaty vehicular Tetris in heels when I went to retrieve my car and found it wedged behind two others in a parking lot; the only guy on-site didn't know how to drive (obviously) so he threw three sets of keys at me, said, "Don't scratch the Lexus" and went back to his chair.

I don't want a Friday: I want a full-on party. 

Paper Planes

Last Wednesday. I leap out of bed at 5:32am to wait 7 hours (what!?) for an 80-minute flight. Now I'm sitting in the departures lounge of Spriggs and all the posters are telling me I'm probably going to die today. Nice. I'm boarding the UN plane to Harper, Maryland County, the southernmost point in Liberia, a place I've never been to but that's in my mom's blood.

Everyone visits Cape Mount, where my dad's family is from (left) but Maryland is a little less...obvious (right).

  

This place is half the reason I'm on Earth and I felt it all over me about five minutes after landing.

But back to the airport. We leave a freezing lounge and walk single-file like baby chicks across the hot tarmac. I am the only non-military girl in the group and all the Pakistani and Indian soldiers eye me strangely like the ugly duckling in an American Apparel hoodie. I know I don't belong and worry they'll boot me off the flight but then the doors close and the engines start. I'm flying south from Monrovia for once, over all the little shacks sitting in Matadi mangroves against all logic and reason. I find myself seated directly under a propeller. It looks like a deadly pinwheel. I plan what I'll do if it detaches from the plane and bursts through my wall. Three minutes in, we disappear into cloud cover and I think, "Well, there are worse ways to go." Then the sea opens up below and there is just so much freaking water.

We're still ascending; the thick yellow coastline gets thinner until it's just a child's sketch in white chalk dots.The river goes on and on like the long, mean slide in Chutes & Ladders. Everything else is green and there are no towns. The land disappears and suddenly there's only my pinwheel propeller and the ocean and sad, cigar bar smokiness; Gangstarr plays in my head. The sand and the river are snakes racing past trees that are dense and awesome like all the hair you never see sported in Monrovia.

21 people sit aboard looking bored, but me? I’m filling pages writing this.

There are weird splashes and stripes in the ocean but I've got no one to ask what's up so I tell myself it's a train of dolphins. (It's not.) From above, the waves are still sheets of salt lying just offshore. Suddenly, the forest turns into hilly plains and I'm bouncing involuntarily in my seat. I see a fat, red road that looks like an artery. People below wave up at the plane.

When we land, it sounds like a contract tearing in half and I think, "Seriously? I'm going to do this again in two days?" (I'm not, but I don't know that yet.) I uncharacteristically ask total strangers for a lift to town and get deposited at my buddy's place at the top of the hill, Up Cape. We go for a walk and I fall in love over and over again because there is nothing cooler than shipwrecks and trees growing inside abandoned mansions, here at the edge of the world.

I have a swell two days roaming my ancestral ghost town and pack my bag to head back to Monrovia but of course, because I'm me, the flight is canceled. Rain. Everywhere. Stubborn pools collect triumphantly in every room in the house and the roof cries quietly onto my nose over breakfast. The whole community is submerged in water. This somehow works out for me, though, because now I've got the whole weekend to get into trouble in Harper. I eat spaghetti and pseudo-Spam in a roadside tea shop and sip condensed milk and coffee as a funeral procession goes by. I watch my first (ever?) soccer match on a swampy field in the rain. I walk into a club and realize my shirt is inside out. I befriend dogs and children. I meet my doppelganger: she's got grandchildren and I want to be one of them.

Monday comes too soon. I'm on the back of a motorbike and am so grateful for the sand in my eyes 'cause now I've got an excuse to wipe them. I drag my feet through the airport gate. No one tells me I'm taking a helicopter home, though, so I'm all kinds of confused for a while. I've got on those ridiculous headphones and am facing ten other people. All the signs are in Russian and men's thighs are pressed up against mine. Great. I strap myself in. The windows are open. I fall asleep for the first hour. (What. It's like a loud rocking chair. Leave me alone...) When I wake up, everything below is soggy and Wednesday's flight plays out in reverse. I'm starving and being chatted up by two completely inappropriate people. No one has boundaries anymore. 

The helicopter touches down like a sparrow landing on a twig. It's soundless. I grab my bag and hightail it out of there, only slightly deaf. I hop on the back of a Malian's motorbike and am overwhelmed by how much is going on in Monrovia. It's the anti-Harper. I don't know how I feel about anything anymore.

I leave Liberia in nine days. 

Break Fast

A week ago at work, I walked to the printer and passed the table where the cool kids eat big Liberian lunches. The girl seated there looked up and said, "I'm eating."

I stood there for a while, clinging to my printout and wondering if I'd asked her if she was eating. I decided that I definitely had not so I just stared stupidly at her and said, "Yes."

The girl took pity on me and explained herself. “That means, ‘Come join me.’”

WHAT?!

Then today, at 6:29am, I was jogging out of the compound to catch a ride to the airport when a stranger jumped into my path and said, "Morning! I'm having my breakfast." I don’t learn anything anymore so I'd already forgotten the previous week's lesson in code-talking. Luckily, the man added, "Join me?" and held out a Liberian donut. What I told him was, "Thanks but I’m getting on a plane." What I wanted to tell him was, "Bro, it is six in the morning. I'm not even conscious yet. Why are you giving me deep-fried foods..."

Unanticipated sharing leaves me feeling uneasy. Thankfully, the world attempted to right itself on Monday when, while collecting my car from a Mamba Point parking lot, the attendant handed me my keys in painstaking slow-motion and said, "I want bread."

Just like that.

What I wanted to reply was, "M*therf*cker, I've made, like, $11 this year. Please let me get in my car." But then I thought about all the San Francisco sourdough and Lower East Side bagels that dance on two legs in my dreams and said, instead, "Shit, man. So do I.” I finally understood all the uninvited giving and taking. I may leave this place a slightly less awful person yet.

Rat-tat-tat-tat

There is no beginning or end to this one so forgive me. On Monday, a Liberian waiter set a dish in front of me. I was the night's designated driver (…), which is the only reason I spotted the swastika tattooed on the squishy place between his thumb and index finger.

Someone – I beg you. Explain. Is this a thing? If this is a thing, I'm converting to Judaism. The world needs balance.