Talking from beyond the grave

It's three o'clock, saturday the 17th, and everyone is under something. My fruit seller is asleep under his fruit stand, wearing same green sweater as always, the dogs are lying in the shade of trees, and i'm under deadline pressure. It is almost time to go. I need to finish this last paper.

Yesterday, I got these messages from these two ghosts,





who got on a plane and flew away from Dakar, out of my life, on Wednesday.

it's nine o'clock and i'm getting ready to get dressed. they want to go out around ten thirty. a big dee-fucking-deet, if it's before midnight, it's stupid. i miss our faces and/at baobab 4. the new music here sucks, and evidently the movies do, too. keep pissing glitter jj.

and

toilet...paper...everywhere...

when they got in their cabs to go to the airport it brought a little song to mind
it's just emotions taking me over.. caught up in sorrow, lost in the song.., beyonce version, thank you very much, which we sang all night at the bar.

the days leading up to this were grand. we crashed a birthday party at a church at 2 a.m. full of 20 senegalese people sitting in chairs and 5 senegalese girls eating birthday cake out of a box in the corner, and we walked in wildly and started dancing.

"that's not even dancing, it's more like you're doing sports!" (lost in translation?)

then at 3 a.m. we bought a bunch of these and demolished them around the ketchupy nest of wrappers sitting in the middle of our table.


these are hamburgers, can you tell?

I'm glad I changed my ticket. I was not yet ready to go, even if i had you know, finished all my finals. Minnesota, one of the few American friends I have left here, has come down with la palu, or the malaria if you havent spent the last four months in west africa, and he says it feels like everything he touches hurts him. I have the very same, very cliche feelings on the inside because of this hypersensitive anxiety about leaving. I've been drinking a lot of water. I don't know what else to do.