Tuareg Territory, Northern Niger, Africa
~Bella~
I'd come to Africa prepared for anything, except snow.
Amadou was shaking the tent flaps, and I spluttered awake to goosebumps and his whisper through the dark. I didn't bother waking Edward. His sleeping came to him easier, less fight and more surrender, which made him impossible to wake. He needed it—his body catching up to him—so I tugged the blanket up over his shoulder and followed Amadou into the night.
We walked the sand as the sky began to pale, the silvery slip of moon chased down by the sun. I followed Amadou's tall shadow, shrouded in his indigo clothing, his footprints in the snow up the crest of a dune as he told me his grandmother's survival story. Lost on the desert, in a blizzard, nearly frozen to death, and then baked back to life.
For the first time in months, I felt that sickening wave of home roll over me.
Snow wasn't as rare here as I thought, contradictory as it was. Amadou had seen it once before, when he was just a boy and still believed in miracles. He warned me that it wouldn't last long, a few hours at best, and I took advantage of my meager time. Three rolls of film and half an hour after sunrise, Edward came loping up the dunes, a pinprick on the horizon growing steadily bigger as he approached. I took a progression of shots of him, the first rays of the snow-killing sun painting him in gold.
He handed me the camera he carried, pulling me in to press his lips to my forehead.
"Thought you might want this."
I nodded and clutched the old Nikon, his first camera feeling all too familiar to my fingertips. He rubbed his face as he looked off across the snowy sand drifts, a chill on the breeze. The beard he'd grown out during our month in Iceland, two weeks in an Italian village, six days in Istanbul, that week in Nairobi, was gone. Scruffy and scratchy in the very best of ways, I'd grown to like it, despite wanting it gone.
He'd emerged from our tent the first night we spent in Niger, clean-shaven.
Bright-eyed and smiling at me. His whole face—just the way I liked him.
I'd spent the last four days feeling oddly homesick. The flat grasslands and big empty sky reminded me so much of the Midwest that I'd woken up disoriented and unsure of myself every single morning we'd been here. Emerging from our tent and having to remind myself that this was real. That Edward was still sleeping somewhere behind me. That the sky might be the same, but the grass under my feet wasn't. That I wouldn't turn around and find myself shrouded in the looming shadow of my house, risen from a grave of fire and ghosts.
That I was free—really free— after a lifetime spent shackled to my mother's moods and my own fear.
I slipped my hand under the neck of my t-shirt as the sun broke the horizon line, fingers finding the rows of tiny scabs that now decorated my shoulder blade. Amadou had done it, a gift he offered me after I showed him to load film into a camera. I had gifted him with a camera, one he seemed to have a knack for that I didn't, and he returned my favor, insisting I take something of Africa with me when I left. I let him take a clean razor and a pot of ash burned clean and hot off the acacia trees to my skin. Tiny nicks that only hurt for a moment, his fingers rubbing soot into my flesh, leaving a design that looked like an exploding shadowed sun, forever etched onto my body. It was itchy and sore, but I'd wanted something to commemorate our nine months of travel before we flew back into reality, and I couldn't think of a better way to remember all of this than the sun at my back.
Our money was running low. There was still a little bit trickling in from the renters who had moved into Edward's house and the last of the insurance payout from the fire. I'd made some money here and there, selling photographs in street corner coffee shops or startup art galleries, if we stayed somewhere long enough to bother. Edward seemed unworried, telling me he had money saved up from years of making yet never spending, but I didn't know what was going to happen to us. When we would stop moving or where. I wasn't sure if either of us could put down roots or love a place enough to stay.
The thought of making that decision made me nervous, so I'd been avoiding it like a bad dream.
Amadou was right—the snow lasted a meager three hours. I filled thirteen rolls before we abandoned the dunes for our breakfast.
"We'll need to visit Niamey soon. Send these off." I added my snow photos to the growing stockpile of elephants marching the horizon, glowing lion eyes in the dark. I'd tried to develop my own film in a bathroom in Russia, but I ruined two entire rolls before I gave up—too much light creeping in through cracks in the linoleum, and not enough developer in the entire city of Izhevsk. I'd lost another roll at a cheap convenience store in Japan and had another two destroyed by an underpaid employee in a camera shop in Rio before I gave up.
We had been sending all of my film to Rose ever since, our year in photos waiting for us when we finally returned to the States. Edward called it safekeeping, but I'd begun to think of it as something that tied me back, a tether around my ankle tugging me home.
A breadcrumb trail through the world in case I forgot my way.
Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.
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HB&PB