wipe after reading

I am crying all the time this week and in order to get anything done, I have to keep working while I cry. Screens are a blur, phones get wet. I cried in the taxi all the way to East Legon and cried in the Uber home. We passed through some heavy intersections where people from the North whose mothers feared vaccines are living out their groundfloor days on handmade skateboards and, if very lucky, in a wheelchair. A sweet-faced lady in a chair was trolleyed past my window. She recognised white and put out her cupped hand. Mami, how are you today? I am fine, I told her, leaking water like a can of honey tapped full of holes. Thank you, I told the beautiful man shriveled from the waist down whose crossed feet were flippers on the eroded wood, he was selling keychains and lighters and I wanted to open my purse but all I could do was say, I’m sorry I cannot help you today. I’m so sorry. I had gone over there for a massage, my first since packing up Berlin in a tower of boxes, an overdue luxury that must have cost his three month rent. On the table I lay face down crying through the hole. The masseuse passed me kitchen towels at intervals. Her name was Beauty, no, Gifty. That used to be my name, too. Today all I had was the remnants of myself a lover leaves us with and self pity lit like a beacon flaring and travelling across several hills. I had the cheap Chinese canteen in which a man in his seventies asked How are you, and I said, cheerfully, very hungry, how are you, and he said, not the best, and I sat down and he began to speak.

We had a conversation which consisted of his facts delivered with no gift wrapping. He didn’t even need me to say really? wow, that’s incredible. He told me about Australia, it is very large, a country but also a continent. Yes, I said. I’ve noticed. He told me we grow wine in Australia. Some few minutes in I told him this is not a real conversation, you have not asked me one question apart from the obvious gambit of where are you from, and now you’re handing me information I already have as though you’re teaching me something, men treat women like this all the time and I have had a bellyful, I’m tired. He looked at me as though I had spat across him. Then he said, I have two daughters. I waited for, they tell me this, and I realise now I have never listened to them. Instead he began to hand me information of a more personal kind, one lives in LA and one on the peninsula where he grew up, they have good husbands but they’re neither of them happy. This was an accusation I recognised. Why had I left the man who says he loves me and who won’t stop calling even now. Why break my own heart. Why can’t we be happy. I said, interrupting again, maybe that’s because they are living in a world where men treat women the way you are treating me right now, it is tiring, you don’t let us be fully human, you don’t find out who we are. He looked startled. Then he said, I grew up on a peninsula in Italy, it is just as hot there as here but we don’t have the humidity. Humidity is worse than heat. No, I said. No! I put up my hand, put up my whole arm. My food arrived and I gathered it in with the crook of my free arm. “I’ve given you two chances and that’s all you get. Why not treat women more graciously. Why not learn from us for a change.” It is not, of course, really him I am speaking to, it is all of them, each one a replacement for the traumas of the last, I was crying as I paid my bill and crying as I waited in the thin shade for my taxi and my belly aches like wood left underwater.