As my eyes open, I know we have been traveling for quite some time. At least, I believe we are moving…I can feel the wheels turning beneath me. Beyond the window is only darkness. This road I travel offers no answers to the questions I prod my weary mind with day in, day out. It is a long road. The darkness outside creeps upon me and surrounds my body with its cold, questioning emptiness and I sit, knees touching, hands clasped, tightening themselves deeper into the warmth between my thighs. The only place that brings solace. Crumpled this way, the loneliness almost disappears. I am closer— if nothing—to myself.

I lean my head against the window, face turned, brown eyes desperately searching beyond the scuffed glass of that backseat window belonging to an old Peugeot. I search for something—anything—a form that might emerge from the fingers of the night. My five year old voice whispers out into what feels like an endless void, Paint me something—sand, palm trees, ocean—anything at all… Anything to ground me, to make sense of this moment…

But we keep moving along this road, the absence of street lights creating a thick darkness where landscape should be. Yet I know there is an ocean somewhere beyond the deep night…I feel it’s presence. I can hear the steady crash of the waves, smell the salt thick in the air. Those waves, somewhere beyond this glass, crashing onto saturated sand that still does not hesitate to drink its fill. I can almost see it. But can I? Do I dare to drink in the hope of something I cannot see? Cannot touch? Were I to stumble from the confines of Peugeot’s glass, would my feet carry me far enough—close enough—that I might stretch out my hand and touch the very waves that soothe my ears tonight?

My soul still wanders at this moment, just as on a road in Liberia so long ago, and I know not where I travel to. My mind searches a dark space that offers no images to satiate my desire for something real—for something to see—something to grasp. Answers. Direction.

And yet, sometimes I believe I can hear the distant crash of waves somewhere, or catch the briefest whiff of salt in the air, and I think maybe. Just maybe there is an ocean somewhere beyond all of this endless night.

Creator, Ubangiji, Allah—lead me to the soothing touch of rhythmic waves on warm, tired flesh. I long to touch it.

I have cried many oceans for it.