drink the air

Rhythm of Pavement

/ Martha Truxton Heller / Leave a comment

In these long, bleak days of the winter months, I feel the sadness deep in my bones. It’s always there—nestled just beneath—but something about the cold and the dark gives it life and it creeps ever up until I can barely breathe. Some days I manage to find the little things that bring just enough beauty and light to get me through the day. Other days I drown in it. I want to be anyone else but me. To be anywhere else but here…

It’s 1998. On a cold night in December, Kristie wants to go somewhere—anywhere—just away.  Away from the college textbooks, the endless studying and the stifling country campus. When the hour slips past 9 pm, four of us jump in a car and begin the long drive to New York City.

The journey is quiet. We stare out our windows at the night rolling by, minds full and clouded, droning endlessly like the car engine and the scraping of the road as it moves beneath us. An hour slips by—trapped in our heads, rhythm of pavement, emptying—then a dim light from the back seat clicks on. We hear John shifting positions on his seat towards the light, and then his soft, deep voice begins, slowly penetrating the silence.

“Peyote Poem. ‘Clear—the senses bright—sitting in the black chair…’” His voice soothes, draws us away from the pavement. “‘The beautiful things are not of ourselves but I watch them…Writing the music of life in words.’” The road slips beneath. We listen to John’s voice, following Michael McClure through his peyote mind journey as the highway brings us ever further from our own familiar.  Still the road slips beneath.

“‘I have lived out the phases of life from patterned opulence to stark unheeding…I KNOW ALL THAT THERE IS TO KNOW, feel all that there is to feel…Perfection.’”

Suddenly New York City stretches before us in a mass of lights and a rainforest of tall concrete, heightening the awe we feel at this moment for the written word and how it reaches deep in our bones. Perfection. We wander the city, listening to each other read Philip Lamantia, Diane DiPrima and Amiri Baraka, drinking in the energy of the city as it mingles with the beauty of the night. We watch the strikingly diverse people that pass us on the street and sit around us in cafes. We bathe in the music that flows from windows and doorways and jazz clubs. We drink our fill of the night as the city’s glow slowly shifts to dawn.

Soon it is 5 a.m. and we are back in the car, listening to the drone of the road once again. Our eyes fall for awhile, heavy with the weight of early morning, until the sun begins to rise above the city skyline that we have long since left behind. John hands his Beat Reader over to Kristie and her faint, tired voice seeps slowly into our skin. “Sunflower Sutra. By Allen Ginsberg. ‘I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock…’” Her voice guides us back through the dirt and the chaos as the road continues to slip beneath. Rhythm of pavement. Emptying. Reminding me that there is always beauty to be found. Always. Even in the cold and the dark. “‘We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside.’”

The sunrise paints our faces orange at that moment and we sit back to hold our memories there—hold them in that beautiful light of new day—before we return completely to where we came from.

And forget.

photo by Zac Ong

Leaving Home

/ Martha Truxton Heller / 42 Comments

1

I left Nigeria on a day when dark clouds cluttered the sky over the Plateau, and the delicious smell of approaching rain hung in the thick air.  I remember standing on the red dirt road in front of our house, waiting to board the van that was to take me across bush roads to our tiny international airport.  I remember the scent of the mango tree, the soft prickle of heat on my skin, and the tremendous ache in my heart.  I remember the fear.  I remember desperately, silently choking back the tears that burned deep in my throat.  And I remember the moment that I broke under their weight, for at that moment the heavy clouds gave way.  The Plateau sky opened up and gently poured its aching over my skin.  Clouds, dark and full released rain so gentle and so steady that I was quickly lost in it.  The rain was strong arms slipping around me, pulling me close, calming my rage.  My country was crying for me.  And I let it.  I didn’t run for the cover of a roof, click open an umbrella, or slip a hood over my head.  I let it pour down and soak every inch of me until I shook with the weight of fabric soaked cold and the burden of my own tears.  My hearts’ cry mixing with tears from heaven, sliding down my skin, dripping all my anger into the mud at my feet.  I couldn’t bear to leave.

But I did.

Eighteen years have slipped by since that day, yet it visits me still.  I was the middle child of career missionaries in Nigeria, West Africa, and a little town called Jos is where I spent most of my growing-up years.  The red Harmattan dust, the smell of kosai and yams frying along the road, the sweet scent of an approaching thunderstorm, and streets bustling with dark, friendly faces are what was familiar to me.  It permeated every piece of me, seeped into my skin and colored my vision.  And yet, even here, I felt unsettled. No matter how dear to me was this place and these people—no matter how many afternoons I spent running barefoot through the red dirt, no matter how many guavas I ate right off the tree—I knew I could never be fully Nigerian.  Somehow, I would always be bature: a visiting white face, with roots someplace else.  Home, I was told, was back in the United States, where style was contemporary, stores were colossal, and the air was bitter with winter.  But it didn’t feel like home.  Not once in all the times we visited America did anything feel familiar.  It was always changing, always alien, always frightening.  I did not know this place.  It was not mine.

Most of my childhood I spent trying desperately to figure out where I belonged: years of finding, losing, grieving… I still don’t know.  That little cinderblock house in Jos was the only thing that ever made sense.  It never really changed—it was constant—and I always felt safe within its walls.  It didn’t matter where in the world we journeyed to, we always ended up back under that same tin roof.  It was home, soaked with its scents and its memories.  It was my hiding place from the world that confused and rejected me—on both sides of the ocean—again and again.  The path I’ve traveled as a Third Culture Kid is strewn with the carcasses of goodbyes, but this…this was the hardest one yet.  Leaving home meant leaving behind the only thing that had ever seemed right in my life.  And I was terrified.  I remember watching the puddles gather at my feet, the red mud growing thick, my tears dripping hard, and I remember wondering how long that profound ache would linger.  How long would my heart remain here—under Plateau skies—after my feet would uproot from that driveway and walk away?

For years afterward, my memories of childhood in Nigeria continued to stir such deep sadness in every part of me, crippling my spirit and morphing into a silent anger towards everyone I met.  I wandered through the busyness of college years pretending to have it all together.  Pretending I knew who I was.  Pretending the ache wasn’t there.  Always pretending.  Desperately wanting to completely belong.  Somewhere.  Anywhere.

It took me a long time to finally figure out that my memories of home are okay to carry around, and that being an uprooted, countryless TCK isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I spent so many years feeling isolated and angry and wishing I could have been someone else, that I missed one of the most beautiful things about being a TCK: there are SO many of us.  All wandering.  All worn from the heaviness of so many goodbyes.  All confused and colorful with our mix of cultures and our refusing to blend in.  My memories of home don’t need to cripple me, they make me solid.  They are what stay with me, just under my skin, and color my present.  They are mine.  That moldy smell of elephant grass, the blue lizards with their orange heads sunning and nodding on concrete ledges, the swishing and clicking of mango tree branches in the soft, warm evening wind….

In Hausa they say “sha iska,” which literally means drink air.  That phrase always stirs something cavernous and piercing in my spirit, something that cries out for belonging.  Whoever you are, wherever you are, whether you feel you belong somewhere or not: DRINK the air.  Don’t just exist, don’t just wander unnoticing through each day.  Breathe deeply of life. Swallow each moment, savor it, keep it, for it will not linger long.  Drink in the bursting laughter of your children, and the way the setting sun looks as it casts its glow on the dry, golden cornfields.  The earthy scent of coffee brewing early in the morning, and the dizzying whirl of red and yellow leaves against October sky.  Sha iska.  Live fully.  When my children curl up in my lap and I hold them close, when my husband silently curls his fingers through mine in a crowded room, when an old friend and I laugh about a shared experience back across the ocean…in those small, scattered moments I feel like I just might belong somewhere.  Those sprinkled moments where I find I can truly drink of the air—I can sip deep from the uncomplicated loveliness of life, and all of my solitude and all of my uncertainty doesn’t matter anymore.  I belong right there.

Sometimes I think back to that day I left home, and I wonder when it was that my heart finally slipped away from it.  I like to think that I drank so fully of those moments that if I were to go back, my tears would no longer fall out of anger and confusion and fear, but out of gratitude…out of knowing that I had a good thing, I drank fully of it, and I would carry it always close—just under my skin—where it could color my today.