Whirlwind #9

university, and now he was trying to change things back in Dagoretti. His presence on my campus at that moment made all the intangible bullshit about world peace and eliminating hunger and poverty suddenly present and viable, embodied undeniably in the solid, compassionate body in front of me.

It broke and renewed my heart. I wanted go to, to see, to help.

But now I sat, in Kenya, having just driven through the mountains over the Rift Valley, and all of it seemed unreal again. I was here, and once again more jaded than I was four years ago standing in that theater. Hardly world-weary, I loved the world. I was obsessed with the world. I wanted to go everywhere and do everything. But I had lost faith, lost a certain confidence in my ideals and in my goals, in my ability to help anyone, in what I thought about love and what I thought about life.

I had a filter that didn’t allow me to be properly horrified by a teenager telling me his brother’s head was cut off. I had an attitude that made me feel better than my friends because I had watched a goat being slaughtered and they didn’t. I had broken up with my first real love, a boyfriend of four and a half years, because not only did I not love him anymore, but I was also in love with someone new back in Philadelphia--an absurd and inconvenient type of love, the kind that demands reckless cliches of heart stopping and lungs giving out and head turning to fog.

And as I sat on the decaying wood of a foreign continent 8,000 miles away, I wished I could see him.

And I wondered about how quickly life passes out of existence, like love, which, before now, I didn’t think could. And, I thought, maybe my first love dying, even a love that had seemed to me, in my small and sheltered life, to be as grand and permanent as any great writer could have written, maybe even that love dying shouldn’t be such a shock in the face of the end of a life. Because that goat had eyes that saw me, and it felt the grass that I was walking on, and it had black spots on its sides at certain angles which made it unique from any other goat, and because that goat lived in Africa for years and felt the lukewarm sun of the elevated plains of Kenya on its back since it was born.

As they skinned it first and then began removing its organs I saw from afar its intestines, packed with a hundred tiny balls of shit that would never make it to the ground, never wind up under someone’s unsuspecting foot or become part of a more fertilized earth. That goat had been alive, and then a knife flashed in the afternoon light and a breath was inhaled and the goat’s eyes did not see anymore.

If that goat could die, just like that, of course love could too, even my first love, which I thought could transcend anything, anything. I was young, and these lessons were hard-won. I pinched my arm, hard, as I felt the unwelcome and all-consuming longing for someone new fill me. I walked back to the crowd in a stranger’s body, because they were letting us take turns skinning the goat with the knife, and I wanted to try. * * * The bonfire blazed and Boi resumed his place in the center of the circle, the eternal jokester of the crew, egging everyone on and acting like a clown. No one would know he had just told me about his brother’s brutal murder. I turned to the other girls I was traveling with.

“Does anyone want to go check out this sky?”

We walked.

The stars were completely different here, filtered and brightened to a lux glow, with what looked like the brilliance of the Milky Way directly above us. I felt naked under this immeasurable expanse, as if somewhere above us God was wryly observing our ineffectual efforts. The five of us lay down in the grass to stare up.

“Boi just told me his brother had his head cut off,” I confessed.

“What! Holy shit!” Kate said.

“Yeah, like a goat, he said,” I explained, “I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to that? And I was wondering if it’s really true.”

5