If I were a black man, I would want my hair to look exactly like this:

Look at it in action:

Wow! It flies! Wouldn’t you want hair that could do that?

Sorry for all the problems with my last post. Computers hate me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, good. Problem solved. (For now.)

Tonight I watched Hotel Rwanda again while stuffing envelopes with support letters for the May Congo trip. On the letters are pictures—of Asha, of her baby Faida, of Bishop. Sometimes I feel such a weight, such a weight, like I came back from Congo a hundred pounds heavier. The knowledge of them and what they’ve lived through and what they’re still living through can be hard to carry around. I email Bishop and Fiston on a somewhat regular basis, telling them I’m coming back. Right now, I’m listening to a CD I bought in a Bukavu music shop, a tiny room whose walls were plastered with pictures of musicians, a black boom box with bad speakers belting out music in a language I couldn’t understand. The sounds of Bukavu—the music, always piped through bad speakers, unless played live; the lovely clinking of bottles as men carrying sodas in tin buckets on their heads advertised their goods by running metal bottle openers against the glass bottles. People, and cars, and chickens, and motorcycles.

I’d watched Hotel Rwanda before the trip last year, but this was the first time I’d seen it since. It was a shock in the beginning to realize I recognized things. I couldn’t pick out or label any building except the airport, but it was immediately familiar to me. When we landed in Kigali and drove out of the city and toward the border, it had seemed entirely and utterly foreign, as if I had walked off an airplane and onto another planet. But now, having seen parts of that city, having passed through those streets, the sights seem familiar. I wonder what it will feel like to be there again. To walk across that border.

Before I went to Congo last year, my parents worried over our itinerary, which had us spending the night in a Rwanda border town. They knew about the genocide—by now, pretty much everyone knows at least a little about the genocide. What many fewer people know is that when the architects of the genocide fled the country, they fled into Congo. Set up camp. Reorganized. There’s a line at the end of Hotel Rwanda, just before the credits roll, that references this, a line of text about Congo. When I saw that line, I thought, And so it begins. How strange to think as one story wraps up, another begins. Or maybe the story never ends, it just relocates.

But the funny thing is, for all my parents’ concern, Rwanda has done spectacularly well, all things considered. I’d vacation there. Lots of people do just that. You’d never guess something so ghastly could happen in a place so beautiful; that’s what was running through my head as we drove on fairly good roads from the capital to the border. The closer we got to Congo, though, the worse the roads became.

Rwanda gives me hope for Congo, to see how far a place can come, to see what odds can be surmounted. Maybe one day, we’ll see a movie about Congo, and we’ll say, can you believe that happened there? Can you believe the country was once in ruins? And that, I know, will be a wonderful day.

So, the Congo preparation has begun again. My visa application is filled out, and I’m already having quasi-nightmares. Last night, I was at the airport without the following items, which my brain deemed most important: a neck pillow, medicine, and an eye mask. Frantic, I called Jesse to have him bring the items in a backpack. I woke up, told my brain to stop dreaming about Congo. I told it: Stop dreaming about Congo. Then, I fell asleep and dreamed about Congo. The next dream, we were already there, but I was wearing PJs. Then, my travel mates and I sat around in a living room, and no one really spoke to me. They talked to each other, they asked me a question or two, but no one had an actual conversation with me.

Before I fall asleep each night, it seems my mind can do nothing other than think of all the things I have to do in the next few months. Make a doctor’s appointment to get malaria meds, extra prescriptions of antibiotics in case I get sick there, and any vaccines I’m not current on. Get passport photos for the visa application. Buy stuff—hand wipes, bug spray, protein bars. Somehow come up with an ungodly amount of money to pay for all this. (That would be where “support raising” comes in—something I fear I may be allergic to.)

We had our first team meeting last Sunday, and going into it I felt somewhat sick to my stomach. For every bit of excitement I have about going back, I have an equal amount of “Oh crap, what have I done?”

I remember the morning I walked across the Rwanda-Congo border, toward Bukavu. I could literally feel order and reason falling away, like skin shedding off a snake, revealing something bright and something sinister underneath. Congo was chaos, it was manic energy. As we stood outside a squat, yellow building while Bishop and Robin got our visas, we smelled urine and human sweat and something else, something fetid. The air was still and warm. A man hobbled down the street toward us, a growth under his face the size of a couple grapefruits, making him look like one of those caricatures of Jay Leno, an enormous chin, only this was decidedly not funny.

It’s those images that come to mind now, as I go to team meetings and listen as a group of college students say how excited they are to go. I’m on this team because I’ve been before, because they can look at me and say, see, you can go to Congo and be just fine, and because I can tell them to bring a bottle of Cipro and only eat raw vegetables that have thick skins. What I want to tell them is that being in Congo feels like spending two weeks inside a pressure cooker.

But in my dream last night, there was also the lake. The bougainvillea, the mist rising off the jungles, the banana trees, the avocados. There was seeing Fiston again (though my subconscious gave him a mustache—what’s up with that?), seeing Bishop and Mama Lily and everybody. I told the team I was going back for those people, to show them I had not forgotten, that I had not forgotten what I’d seen and heard, that I will never forget.

And so I will fill out the forms and I will send the letters and I will buy the stuff. And I will pack a suitcase and a backpack (hopefully forgetting nothing important). And I will spend two days straight in a series of airplanes. And I will pass the Rwandan hills and fields of tea and clusters of eucalyptus trees. And I will cross the border and feel Congo hit me like a closed fist, and I will hate it and I will love it.

My favorite expressions these days is “through the wringer.” As in, “You’ve been through the wringer lately,” or, “Jesse and I have been through the wringer together.” As in, this sucks. Or, that sucked. Today I feel exhausted and, well, flattened. Yesterday was one of those wringer days.

It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

* Just notes so I won’t forget

7-86…Daddy was laid off

9-86…Mommy went to work for 3 mos. while Daddy stayed with you

12-86…We sold our house, bought a 2/BR mobile home and moved to Marshall, about 12 mi out of Ripley, WV, Jackson County. Just takes about 20 min. to get to Granny’s in Ravenswood.

1-87…Daddy started electronics school but soon was notified no funds to continue

3-87…Pappy, Daddy, Mommy and Erin went to visit Aunt Bid and Uncle Gene in Orlando, FL. Stayed 2 wks. Erin and Mom got real bad colds.

4-87…Erin developed pneumonia from her cold. I developed an allergy to the sulfa drugs prescribed by a doctor at Drs. Urgent Care in Cross Lanes. We had just gone there for them to check Erin’s ears and throat; that’s when the pneumonia was diagnosed. After 10 days, I developed the allergy, was hospitalized 4 days. Garry went back to FL and we stayed behind to sell trailer, etc.

5-1-87…Garry returned for us; we arrived in Orlando day before Erin’s 4^th birthday

8-15-87…Moved to Titusville, FL. Erin became increasingly sad over losing Bo Bo. It took her about 3 mos. of crying off and on over him.

9-15-87…Enrolled Erin in Titusville Christian School. After a few days, she became very upset at the thought of school. After 6 wks., I took her out of the school.

12-16-87…Pappy and Granny came to visit for 5 wks. Lots of juicy oranges on our tree.

2-88…Erin enrolled in First United Methodist Preschool.

4-88…Started resisting going after being off a lot in March due to illness. I think she was too bashful on the playground; but other factors, too. She’s growing up very fast.

5-7-88…We spent day at Ormond Beach, Pam, Kate, her cousin Annie, Richard, Aunt and Uncle, Garry and I. Kate started breaking out w/chicken pox. Badly sunburned.

5-19…Erin had a few chicken pox on her, then fully broke out next day. No fever. Very uncomfortable, but they did not cover her entire body.

6-88…We have been looking for a house for a couple or more months. Interest rates were at 9 ½; now at 10.58 and rising.

Today, I spent several hours at two different occasions on the phone with two of the smartest, kindest, most creative people I know. I feel charged up and inspired. Funny, it just struck me that they are both writers, and they’re both blonde. If there were any two women to slaughter the stereotypes of the ditzy blonde, it’s Simona and Visha.

Simona’s hair is light and wispy, wavy in just the right way, and it always looks perfect, like a halo. I once saw her after she’d spent the day at the beach, and her hair had taken on a windswept look that stylists spend hours creating for movie stars in movies about coastal romance. When I spend the day at the beach, my hair stands straight on end, the frizz propping up the rest of my hair in what I can only describe as Wind Tunnel Chic (well, without the “Chic” part). Simona speaks in an almost-whisper, with such a calming voice I always feel like everything will be just fine, if only because she is in the world. She talks about spirituality, about reality, about Congo and Darfur, and she quotes literature and tells me about philosophy, always having the decency to pretend that I already knew the complex concepts she’s outlining for me, listing off philosophers as if I know exactly who she’s talking about and might chime in with a reference to the philosopher’s third book, which I just happened to have read last week (when she talks about Kierkegaard, however, I do get rather animated). And in return for her brilliance, I tell her about my book, the fits and starts and endless rewrites, and she does not think my existence invalid because I don’t have a full-time job with benefits.

Visha’s hair is straight and strawberry blonde, and she’s got this wonderful radio voice, distinctive, a little husky, memorable. She’s spunky and fiery, but incredibly and unfailingly reasonable. She knows how many female directors have been nominated for Best Director in the Oscars, and she has trained two very large dogs into thinking that she—petite, adorable Visha—is bigger than they are. I think she’s magic. And funny, dear heavens, have I mentioned that Visha’s hilarious? If you know her, you already know she’s got a sharp wit, but you also know that she’s unendingly kind. Though I’ve given her plenty of ammunition, never once has she used that humor to make fun of me or to make me feel anything other than entirely good and happy. She cries for people with Alzheimer’s, and she pulls off the side of the road to care for dying dogs hit by cars that long ago sped off. She works at a bookstore, has read probably more books than said bookstore has in its inventory, knows all about experimental film, rails against injustice, defends the defenseless.

How lucky I feel today, not only to have such friends, but to have hours to run down my phone batteries with them, to listen to them and to talk about writing with them, to find out what they think about plot and beginnings and the plight of the MFA workshop. The three of us are trying to do the same thing, really, to struggle with the words on the page, to find the balance between art and life, to find where the line is and to cross it.