one month in.

the waves don't come in gentle here on this beach;
they crash like bolts of thunder and swimming is highly discouraged
because the current is stronger than human strength.
i, naive, blonde, american girl, am swept away the moment the equator is crossed,
the tides of another language, another skin pigment, another currency
carry me away from terra firma, into an ocean of change.
all five senses are forced into, startled into abrupt awakening:

i have no choice in the matter.

i hear the world in french,
the nasal vowels and the conjugation grinding like mortar into my infantile ears.
i see the world as distortion in the mornings,
when i awake to canopy of netting, to the indentation of her body of dreams.
i taste the world as vapid and heavy in the evenings,
the sky, cloudless and dark, hazed over with saharan dust.
i smell the world of my adolescence,
already-charcoaled lungs fuming with the bitter hash--that distinctive scent of
ambition and inhibition smoldering, like ashes, into the night.
and i feel, so often i feel, the world as:

i have no choice in the matter.

but people back in the states, they would say things to me like
wherever you are, there you are.
give god, yourself, and africa a chance.
surrender, in breaking you, will make you unbreakable.
and i am beginning to see, in the current of atrophy, the disarray of senses,

i still
always have a choice in how i will respond.

the leper in me.

if i am a leper,
and jesus has healed me,
the scales no longer clinging to my eyes,
the lesions' contagion no longer tearing away at skin,
then why am i living on mat,
paralyzed by imagined impoverishment?
and if he trusted me to stand,
but instead i lie here,
would it not stand to reason that
i have an altogether different, altogether worse
form of leprosy?
i wonder if jesus knew this-
if he knew, when he asked the 
'are you willing to be made clean again' question,
that if the answer was anything other than yes,
it was a disease even he could not heal.

i know my disease and my disease is
never wanting to be where i am, never resting in the
mountains my faith has moved, never letting my yes
be resounding, instead of feeble and dubious.

i wonder if jesus knew this-
if he knew, when he was asked the
'help me overcome my unbelief' question,
the admission was the gateway to belief.