Moto

Sometimes the sky seems too big, and sometimes a football pitch seems useless, like when there’s no ball, or shoes. Today I ran the pitch, marveling at the clouds rolling in and out like the high packed lorries on the main road. At some point, I don’t know when, we became motorbikes, bumping and vrooming and beeping into one another: a tall pale seliminga among small dark dagombas. At some point, I don’t know when, it stopped seeming so foreign here. Maybe it was when I gleefully held two watermelons like breasts in market and dagomba women smirked at batted my hands down. Perhaps when my first sentence became, not a greeting, but rather a request to eat the children, making yum yum noises as I tickle sweet soft bellies. People are the same everywhere, just as hope is, or hatred, or love. I love this place like fighting, with a ferocity borne of knowing I’ll leave, one day. Long after I stop pretending I came here to save them realize it was I that was saved.