Category: Relationships

On saint interference, spontaneous rebellion, pity spirals and other fragments

5/15/2026

SAINT INTERFERENCE—how they march when the stars fall from the sky and the moon turns red with blood and the sun refuses to shine, the saints go marching in, so the song goes! You know where I learned the most about saints—at the thrift store. I met Saint Theresa, patron saint of flowers, there. I also met Saint Dymphna, patron saint of mental illness, via billboard transference on a highway in Indiana. And wouldn’t you know that today, May 15, is her feast day. There must be some reason why I’m thinking of her today.

SPONTANEOUS REBELLION—of mind and spirit and it comes swift, this sudden awareness to pivot, this turning of directions, a subtle yet firm shift in regard, a reckoning, a way back, a forceful no, a distinct demarcation of borders and boundaries otherwise lacking until the moment you discover the road you thought would go on forever ends. To rebel quells doubt. To rebel fells fatigue. To rebel smells like springtime with the saints—a turning inward for the first time or the last is a secret you share with the sky.

VIVID CONVICTION—where indecision once stalked me I could now walk with the clarity in each step toward the grand doors and down the generous hallways that would lead to an ease in my posture and stance toward the future. The message to keep moving comes from the bird with a worm in its mouth this morning on my windowsill. I told the bird the memo has been received by me, the perceiver of all things taking shape in the world right in the center of my mind’s eye! Good morning, bird, I see you.

BAD ATTENTION—comes from wanting to avoid rejection and so therefore walking straight into the garbage heap, we think we’ll find nuggets of gold there but it’s dipped in disease and when I say I wanted to stay up all night with the man who wrapped his long dreads around my neck like a scarf I mean it but the arrangement didn’t come with eyes or kindness, it came with a long night on a mattress on the floor, the night before. And in the morning, I pushed him out the door and said please don’t come back because I won’t live here anymore, come tomorrow.

RECKLESS REDIRECT—when friends who texted daily cease their pings and friends who sent you invitations for a home-cooked meal quietly disappear from the window of a shared view, and lovers who pulled you from the deck of tarot cards tried to find meaning in your body as a symbol, and lovers who carried you to the clinic to check on your queasy stomach and solar plexus spasms and then left you there, there’s a kind of reckless redirect in their kind regards and the terms have changed but the contract still drips with drops from an earlier ink.

PITY SPIRAL—I try not to go there these days but when I feel it coming on I get down low on the ground and press my forehead to the wooly carpet and marvel at the stitching and wish I knew a thing or two about a heritage craft I could carry with me to the end of my days. I can’t do the high-highs or the low-lows anymore but my panic attacks have taught me that no amount of stress could take me down the road of self-loathing at this point. Once I realized that stress made me sick, I learned to escape the labyrinths we get dropped into with despairing dynamics and at this point, the only time I encounter a pity spiral is when I’m reading about a woman in her early twenties trying to find love.

(note to self: when I find, after reading several books this morning, two-words phrases that feel like doors I need to push open and see what’s in there, I get to sit with thoughts like this, and let them go).

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On the paradox of paradise, policing and releasing what's lost

2/23/2026

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The paradox of paradise—what’s left to say about it, in life or literature? I didn’t move to Zanzibar for the palm trees or the sea breeze, but I learned to seek refuge in it as I tried to dodge the darkness. The place faces paradise pressure beyond measure. Islam and its angels wave in the wind like peace flags. But the daily conundrum is one of culture and clash.

Until I lived in Zanzibar, I hadn’t had any reason to spend so much time in police stations. But during those years, life plucked me from ocean views and fresh fruit smoothies into dimly lit offices where men and women in beige uniforms listened to transistor radios blaring Swahili news, perfecting the art of blank-faced boredom.

I’ll never forget the time I took a taxi to a police station out of town to bail out my ex, who’d been picked up the night prior for fighting at a bar. The taxi driver asked me what business I had at the jail; I clutched my fistful of shillings in the backseat and told him I had boyfriend business. I cranked open the window, let the wind whip my scarf into obscurity, and felt nauseous with shame.

When I arrived, I spotted him in a cell packed with other men, like a can of sardines. He was standing there clutching the bars, wearing his “I heart Chicago” T-shirt—the one I bought for him at Walgreens back home. He thanked me profusely and promised me better days ahead. Eventually, I would file a restraining order against him at a different police station, where the officers all spoke in sideways glances and shuffled their feet—a death dance of doldrum and despondence.

When we realize we’re with the wrong person—that we were the wrong person with them—it is to fall through the cracks of one’s idea of paradise. And in this falling, there’s also the feeling of flying—away or toward what’s real versus what we imagined.

I’m reading an essay by Christian Wiman, his thoughts on reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in Guatemala. In the essay, he talks about the moment in the poem when Eve falls for her own image. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but this line reverberates: “She is everything the will can’t control, an expression of the appetite and passion for a life more intense and eternal than the one that reality offers.”

Talking about this place as a failed paradise is not helpful, to me or anyone else who lives there or remembers what it was like to stay for the duration. But I do think it’s useful to forgive oneself for wanting and imagining so much that you end up drifting very far from the shores of a more solid reality. And sometimes it’s hard to accept that we were never really there the way we thought we were—in body, perhaps, but somewhat unconscious.

And when that happens, “you might find that the hardest things to let go [of] are those you never really took hold of in the first place,” Wiman writes.

One year, a young Spanish couple were on the island for Sauti za Busara, a big live music festival in town. I was working as the interim managing director, doing my best to manage the impossible mayhem of those four days when thousands of tourists flocked and frolicked with total abandon (and disregard for local realities). The couple came to me in a panic; their bag, filled with expensive equipment, had been stolen while they were dancing in the Old Fort. Thieves were afoot, grabbing bags left at the feet of careless foreigners dancing in the thick heat.

They rushed me to the side and begged me to file a police report. The young, tanned man was a self-proclaimed journalist; his curly-haired girlfriend, a sensitive filmmaker. They were there to tell stories and share them with the world. They needed their equipment back. They’d offer a reward to the thieves. I agreed to take a taxi with them to the nearest police station and file a narrative report, written in blue ink that smudged the lined paper. But I knew, as we were filling it out, that this couple would never see their treasures again.

This was the price they paid to play in paradise—things would get lost.

Transit Slips, #23

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On presence and absence, the faces we see in the sea of time

2/21/2026

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Presence, absence, proximity. The paradox of writing alone with a mind crowded with faces. Riding a wave hoping to be seen by adoring crowds on the faraway shore. I close my eyes and imagine the expressions of those I’ve loved and lost to time or death, they defy any known science of the body, their ongoing, continuous insistence on being felt, if not seen.

An island inevitably invites encounter. Whether you are stepping onto its stage or already an actor in the play, the split between land and sea draws a boundary around everyone, and we meet—in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, beach parties and midday living rooms, the office supply shop, the leather shoemakers’ hovel, the daladala depot, boisterous markets clucking with chickens and hawkers selling silverware—we face each other in the heat and wipe our brows as we greet and say goodbye.

Salam alaykum, I practiced with the utmost reverence to the sheha with the protruding belly and a huge mole on his cheek. Mambo vipi, I shouted to the fishermen seated on broken red buckets in a shady spot under a friendly tree. One always called me mwalimu—I worked at the university—and he knew the romance between me and his mate wouldn’t last long, but he continued to say hello to me with genuine respect, long after I had to file a restraining order against his friend.

These guys would wait by the shore in the early morning when the day’s promise hadn’t been weighed down yet by stifling, debilitating heat. The birds chirped, tourists rambled in flip flops and bathing suits, hoping to catch a boat ride to prison island to see the ancient tortoises. My ex and his buddies had a beautiful command of the sea and often took groups out for the day with fresh cut pineapple miraculously appearing on silver trays. The way these guys orchestrated a fantasy that unfolded like a slow-release pill for wary travelers was just remarkable.

Something about prison island bothered me because of its history, perhaps, or its vapid current state. It was set up as a love affair between tourists and tortoises, pay to feed them but not ride them, was the promise. But the prison held the haunted stories of enslavement and disease. I never got over how the tortoises themselves were prisoners of a kind—they’d been brought to Zanzibar as gifts from the Seychelles.

I remember dizzying arguments with my ex on this island when I’d catch rides with him and the innocent tourists he’d take for the day. We’d get there and realize we didn’t have enough food or water for ourselves; the hotel always seemed to be closed or at least closed off to me in my mind. I resented him for taking me out there without a plan, when all he could do was point to the starfish and tell me not to touch it. He offered me smokes and we ate them like bread.

I see his face when I don’t want to see his face, because the encounter closed in a series of violent episodes still too embarrassing and murky to reveal with any clarity. But when these faces from our past lives come into focus, I try to look back as if looking in a mirror—the fear, the fury, the fallibility. And when I do, which is not often, I marvel at the clever ways I found beauty in those days, even when I was suffering and refused to admit it. I'd place a frangipani flower behind my ear and pose for a portrait for a future self.

One last thing I’ll say before I take the dog for a walk this morning—I was often sea sick on these rides. The diesel fumes. The sticky sand on my sunburnt skin. My face puffy with regret. I threw up more than once into the roiling ocean. My stomach would flip if our engine stalled, my mind immediately flooding with fear that we’d be stranded indefinitely. And I have to say, I learned over the years that my ex and all his friends who organized these rides—who called themselves fishermen—knew exactly how to convey a sense of shwari—of total calm.

Even if I never trusted him on land, I always trusted him in the middle of the ocean.

Transit Slips, #20

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On half-here love, proximity, possibility, and praise

2/14/2026

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Once upon a time, I assumed a queen-like status beside a man who lived as a Rastafarian king on the islands of Zanzibar. I towered over him, but that didn’t matter among the hot pink bougainvillea bursting through the bright sunshine on his coastal compound. We were an unlikely pair, formed out of a single utterance one tipsy night in the velvety darkness: “tumpumzishane,” he said—“let’s soothe one another.”

And so began a strange, impossible love affair with a man more legend than discernible fact (at least to me). I noted his mother’s ledge of green plants in metal cans lined up on her verandah in the city, thriving in the tropical heat. I noted his care for the land and his willingness to dole out hours of listening to neighbors as he stroked his scraggly, braided beard in the shade. I noted his soft tones and his exhausted bones, worn down by decades of building bungalows with his own calloused hands.

I also noted, though, his drunken deep dives—days at a time—into pools full of demons, his endless litany of rages and complaints, his incoherent babble in the middle of the night that woke the sleeping dogs, and those tepid apologies days later in the harsh judgment of the morning sun.

I know we tried to love each other in ways that felt familiar, but there was no “we” for the duration—just an I and a You, coordinates in a current constellation in the night sky. I kept mistaking proximity for possibility.

I lost myself in endless reggae playlists. I sipped moringa shakes by the pool, rolling cigarette after cigarette while chatting with the many single Italian mothers who came with their children to swim and splash in the pool (carved in the shape of the continent.) I wore a magenta bathing suit that matched the bougainvillea and tried to forget that I had a self.

Let me say more about all this later, because I want to talk now about a different kind of love I learned on the islands—a Sufi kind of love.

One night, as a freelance journalist covering a famous music festival, I took a long walk down dark, winding roads on the outskirts of Stone Town to a small, unassuming madrasa lit like a lighthouse in the darkness. We arrived at Zizi la Ng’ombe, where men in crisp white kanzu and kofia quickly organized busati (mats) to accommodate the boys and men who would kneel for the Maulidi ya Homu performance.

What transpired was a spellbinding form of dance and praise poetry rooted in Swahili Islamic tradition. Maulidi usually refers to festivities related to the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, but this particular performance--ya homu—is a rare form that invokes the motion of a “steady wind.”

The performance locked me into a percussive trance, the dancers swaying as a collective body, their faces lit, eyes wide with exaltation, cringing or pinged with ecstasy. Sibilant sounds slithered through the song. They moved as one in praise of Allah, a choreographed crescendo of sheer passion.

At its climax, the dancers shuddered and shook on their knees, swooping backward onto their backs and rolling up again into undulating ocean waves of sound. They pounded their fists to the floor, then abruptly lifted themselves, reaching their hands in unison into the air, as if reaching for God’s love, receiving it, and placing it immediately back into the folds of the dance itself.

These Sufi songs felt like "love letters to God," I wrote in my notebook, attempting to describe the slow build, frenzied climax, and gentle release back into the mundane world of the everyday. "The form taps unabashedly into the eros of spirituality, expressing through mind, body, and voice a love much larger than ourselves."

These quotes are borrowed notes from an article I eventually published (the magazine no longer exists) about this experience. All of it still holds true as a snapshot in my body’s memory of what I felt that night, sitting barefoot on the floor of a packed madrasa on the outskirts of town.

Witnessing Maulidi ya Homu dancers changed something in me about the way I want to experience love—of self, God, lovers alike—exaltation and reverence.

I keep thinking about Martin Buber’s notion of the “mysteries of reciprocity.” It’s through the alchemy of relationships that God sneaks in and rearranges the furniture while we’re making dinner in the kitchen. This really only works when I can show up inside myself, however.

So many past loves experienced me as only half-here, and that wasn't fair to me or them. But that’s the way it is sometimes with love-in-becoming.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Transit Slips, #14

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travel far now

On saint interference, spontaneous rebellion, pity spirals and other fragments

On the paradox of paradise, policing and releasing what's lost

On presence and absence, the faces we see in the sea of time

On half-here love, proximity, possibility, and praise

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