the bus

The bus stop is adjacent to the park.

Going on the bus is a social excursion. The nurse next to us smiles at my baby and says to him, “You see this black face? You have a white face!” My son gurgles. I hear her accent – African? She tells me, as if she heard my silent question, pointing at my sling, “In Africa, 1 -2 – 3 months, they go to the back.”

“That would be easier,” I say, “For cooking.” I tell her how dangerous it gets when I’m heating oil. We laugh. I ask her where she is from, and she tells me she is a refugee from Togo.

“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Very much.”

I recall my geography, ask her about the ocean. I feel like I’ve read about ecotourism there; rich people (browning themselves?) on the beaches.

“Yes,” she says. “My father owned a fishing boat.”
She tells me they ate fresh fish and bam, a kind of coconut. (We call our son “Bam,” coincidentally.)
She tells me her five children are all over the world, only her youngest is here with her in the US. One is in Paris. but she says this is a good place for children.
Her mother had nine.
They are planning to return for a trip next year.

“You should go,” she tells me, warmly, extending an invitation for me to come see the place she loves. For a moment, all I want in the world is to do just that; go to Togo, look her up in the phone book. I want to see the blue ocean she’s talking about and feel a different part of the world. I want to see what home looks like to her.

I am also thinking that I’ll never go to Africa. And this feels terrible. I will die having never gone.

I am also thinking of how much I miss my ocean, the Pacific, where I grew up – maybe I am not imagining Togo at all; I’m just remembering a place that used to make my chest cave in when I thought of it, a place I’ll never really return to.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a refugee. But I know what it’s like to be far away from home and to always feel that you are not where you rightly belong. Our oceans mingle in my imagination, become the same missed body.

And then she gets off the bus.

When we return back on the bus three hours later, the woman from Togo is there again. Headache she says, holding her forehead where a bright kerchief is slipping back to reveal gray hair on her brow. And my knees. I go home to rest.

She looks miserable. I don’t know her name. I don’t know really her story, how she ended up here. I felt, on the way, that I’d had this amazing infusion of information; but now I see, as we rattle down the road, that I’ve learned only that there’s so much I don’t know. My imagination made me feel like I was having some kind of poetic experience; reality is, it’s just a bus. We’re not traveling very far together, she and I.

In contrast to the other ebullient woman I meet on this bus ride – I’ll write about her next – the woman from Togo does not say hello to the people on the bus and street corners. She seems lonely. This makes me wonder if refuggees from other countries, though the same “color” as “people of color” born here in America integrate with them, and if so, how.

This question still when I get off the bus, walk along the park towards home, and there’s two boys with backpacks going home from school, speaking to each other in a foreign language. Again, I am wondering where they are from, and suddenly also, how many refugees are in this town, and of those, how many are feeling homesickness? And what do I, what can I do about – think about – that?