Dear Dakar,
I write this letter to you as a love letter,
as a thank you,
as a goodbye-for-now.
I write this letter to you in the armchair
in the sunroom
in my Minneapolis home.
And I tremble a little.
I can't tell why I'm trembling -- whether it's from nostalgia for my month in your embrace
or if it's from the shock of being back in the United States. All I know is that the last few days have been hard without you. Without your honking cabs and sandy streets, your smiling people and their bare feet, I feel un-whole without you.
I feel un-whole without the shouts of French and Wolof resounding in the market. I feel un-whole without the smell of yassa on the stove. I feel un-whole without the salty Atlantic breeze wafting inland, without grains of sand stuck between my toes, without fishing boats and horned goats and carts selling loaves of bread. I feel un--whole without sweet heaps of mangoes, and eating them on the living room couch every night as Papa sipped his tea and nodded at the TV. I feel un-whole without Yaya, Maha, Jolie, and Momo. I feel un-whole without you, Dakar.
I didn't write much about you in the last week and half because I wanted to cherish every moment in your presence. I closed the tabs of my blog in my laptop and I opened my heart to you. In that time, you introduced me to Toubab Dialow, your cousin coastal town. There, I sat by the Atlantic, watching its crashing waves and praying that your lessons would settle within me for the rest of my life. I played soccer on the beach with local boys, who clapped their sandy hands against my palms when we scored and asked why they had never seen me before. I made a dyed batik cloth in the shade of a coconut-tree courtyard and I danced to the pounding rhythm of the live drummers. I laughed and cried and thought about your effect on me, your history, your country's story.
And now I tremble because it is so whack to be back in the US.
I arrived on the Fourth of July. And as all the people around me waved American flags against the blue Minnesota sky, I could only think about you.
I don't know what I'll tell people when they ask about you. I'm not ready to prepare a sixty-second-shpeal about what you taught me, what you showed me. I'm not ready to condense you into small talk, or simplify you into a passing comment.
Before I met you, some friends had said that you would change my life,
that you had already changed theirs. I'd nod and half-heartedly believe them.
But now, I know, I've seen, I've felt, what they had warned me about.
I love and miss you so much, Dakar. Thank you for your teranga.
See you someday again,
Sierra
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