Before All The Surviving

I have just put the kids to sleep and the house is quiet. My day has just started as they usually do at night for me, as I don’t have to play a role. I step out onto the balcony with my Kirkland water and phone, checking the camera in the kids’ room occasionally, watching them sleep on the small screen. I open the notes app and start writing. I could get the laptop but I have become so accustomed to the phone it has become a habit. Juggling a toddler and an infant in a clingy phase has made working on a laptop feel like a dream and I have obligingly adjusted. Most of my anecdotes are written between shushing and three-way feedings, holding the baby and breastfeeding on one hand, feeding the toddler with the other while also feeding myself, and in between the both of us chewing, I am typing.

It is almost eleven pm at night. We live in a large community complex in a small town in Ohio and unsurprisingly, no one is outside. The pathway between the buildings is strung with something like Christmas lights, only they are yellow, and there are benches in the middle of the compound. The breeze is gentle and the temperature feels exactly right.

The windows of the surrounding buildings glow dimly, almost tired but making an effort. Somewhere behind those windows, people are doing whatever people do at eleven pm in Ohio. I have been here for almost a year but it’s still a mystery to me. It’s strange because back in my country it wouldn’t be.

The street at 11 pm would be loud like a marketplace. Children would still be outside chasing something or each other, yelling and laughing. At that corner there would be a woman cutting vegetables you can buy and take home to cook. The smell of chapatis would fill the air, but you wouldn’t be able to trace where the smell is coming from. A matatu would pass by with its graffiti and music turned all the way up, the conductor shouting destinations out the window, almost inviting you to an occasion like the night had somewhere to be. Outside would look like a palette of color with people wearing yellow, pink, red, and some colors in between that I wouldn’t know what to call. The clothes are worn unapologetically, without a care for whether the color matched the skin tone.

I would probably be sitting on a different balcony with a friend. We would be laughing about something foolish. Maybe we would look up and notice a star and wonder what it meant to be one. Maybe we would get hungry and go downstairs with fifty shillings, barely forty cents, and come back with something warm, and we would sit there eating, talking and laughing, and the night would stretch out the way nights do when no one is in a hurry to end them.

Here, the quiet is eerie. Even when a neighbor passes below, it’s a quiet passing, probably a nod or small sound that could be a greeting if you tilted your head the right way. In my country, a neighbor is not just a person who lives next to you. A neighbor can become a friend if you both decide to. The greeting is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

When I first came to America, I thought of it as a project.

I had come to study African studies, and I decided that I would dress for it and not just dress but represent. Every choice of clothing was deliberate with African pattern dresses and tops, earrings shaped like the continent or a woman with an Afro. Wrappers were wound around my head in careful patterns, six of them sometimes, braided, rolled, and knotted into something that stated that I knew where I came from. My lipstick was intentional; it matched my clothes and mood. I also had my beaded sandals, and my whole person was considered, assembled, and offered to the room like a statement I was proud to make.

Back home I went to the salon once a month. Here I couldn’t afford it, so I learned to braid my own hair in my tiny room, spending whole weekends on it because Monday meant class and class meant showing up. The hair stores in downtown New Haven were owned by Asians, which I found interesting and wonderful. We were different people, but they had exactly what I needed. I would buy what I needed and go home and spend hours in the bathroom and emerge looking like what I thought was me.

I would walk into a seminar room and could feel the shift in the air when I entered. Eyes would find me and would settle on my head, mostly on the multicolored and layered wrappers. Once at an event someone commented on them and said they looked so intense. I think it was meant as a compliment but the whole time they were staring at me I felt like I was being stung by a bee. I hate being noticed. I like disappearing into the background, observing, and being the one who watches rather than the one being watched. Now I was the spectacle, standing in the middle of a room full of serious people in jeans, wearing six wrappers on my head and a multicolored dress that didn’t have any business being worn in the fall.

Those stares made me feel like my expectations of how I would be received and reality were different. I had imagined people would see the clothes and think, "Yes, African studies; she is representing.” That the visual would be a kind of language everyone could read. But the staring didn’t feel like recognition. It felt like I had miscalculated something and had shown up to the wrong occasion in the wrong costume, except the costume was me.

No one told me to change, but from that day on, I gradually started changing.

I started with the lipstick. I stopped using matte lipstick and then reduced the wrappers down from six to three, three to one and one to none. I then stopped wearing the dresses. Winter came and I bought trousers, boots and a long heavy jacket and somewhere in the middle of it the heavy jacket became the norm. I took hours in the bathroom trying to straighten my hair because straight felt safer and less visible. Back home someone else had always handled my hair and I was now alone, stuck in the bathroom for hours on a Saturday asking my own hair to be something it wasn’t.

I disappeared.

I wish I wore and appreciated my clothes more because soon after graduation, we became homeless and spent a year moving from one place to another while our possessions were locked in U-Haul storage. Soon after, we ran out of money to pay for storage and we were forced to take what we could and leave what we couldn’t. The ones I did take disappeared somewhere between the moves. The dresses, the wrappers, the earrings shaped like the continent and the shoes which I loved and bought every time I got my allowance. Walmart was my best friend and sometimes I would buy the shoes just to admire them. The braids I had bought from Mid K and kept for reasons I couldn’t explain were all gone. I don’t know where they are but I wish I could find them just to remind myself that the person I was is still inside me. That there was a time before all the surviving where getting dressed was an act of joy.

Now when I open my closet I find black, white, beige, and the gray that lives between them. Nothing that would make someone look or call to me. I now wear scrubs from SHEIN because they are comfortable and joggers from Costco. I went to KOHLS recently and stood in a long aisle of clothes arranged perfectly on their hangers and couldn’t choose anything. Everything was available but nothing was mine. Back home clothes were sold by someone who held them up and shouted the price and you could see yourself inside them. The selling was part of the choosing and the personality of the seller mattered. He would start the sale at an audacious price and I would end up purchasing them at an even more audacious price.

Here, however, everything is organized so completely that it gives you all the choice in the world and no idea what you are choosing.

I think about chameleons sometimes and how they change color to match whatever surface they are standing on. How if they were moved from one leaf to another and another, they would keep changing and adapting. If you observed them changing time and time again, wouldn’t you wonder which color is their original? How about the chameleons themselves? If they could tell us, would they remember?

When I look at myself in the mirror nowadays, I ask myself who I am because I barely recognize the person in the reflection. The painful part about all this is not even being unable to recognize myself but realizing that I was the one who decided what the stares meant and then spent years making myself smaller in response to a verdict I issued myself. I am still deciding if that verdict was wrong, and I occasionally put lipstick on but can’t get out of the door with it.