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Saturday begins as another day of sand, and swim, and relishing my recent return to childhood. I feel pure these days in Zanzibar, like something essential about myself has emerged: a self before pain, before betrayal, before abandonment. My skin has turned the color of honey under the sun’s rays, and this external glow feels to me to be an expression of the sweetness at the center of my pure delight in the world and all its creatures. This childhood I am finding in my middle 40’s has allowed me to shed the  depression and anxiety that has all but crippled me in recent years. I greet the day with enthusiasm and set out for a swim with Pawel, my new friend from our guest house.

Pawel, a handsome man also in his 40s, himself has a childlike quality that I find completely endearing. He’s playful and enthusiastic in a way that’s infectious, in a way that adults so often lose, even when on vacation. Our relationship quickly becomes akin to one of childhood playmates: simple, centered around fun and innocent mischief. Pawel is from Poland but he speaks nearly perfect English. Only occasionally is his ethnicity betrayed by an American idiom he gets mistaken. “I have zero luggage,” he tells me once when we are talking about our relationship history. He means “baggage,” but I don’t correct him because I find the error endearing. Luggage: meaning something carried laboriously; I imagine carrying my emotional pain laboriously in a set of antique hard shell overweight bags — the phrasing works. I smile at the image in my head.

Pawel lives now in Switzerland. It’s the one thing about him that for me is a cloud over our friendship. For me Switzerland is among the worst of triggers. But I don’t tell him this. It’s not a thing that adults say to one another upon first meeting. “Yes I have been to Switzerland as a matter of fact. I would have been about ten. The Swiss man who molested me for six years took me there for several weeks one winter; it was the site of some of the worst abuses I suffered with him. But most of my memories of that time have been mercifully wiped out by a brain in a state of shock trying to protect itself. I remember only the Alps, the St. Bernard in our hotel lobby, and the sting of his hand across my cheek when I told him I loved my mother more than I loved him. But do tell me, how are you finding Switzerland?”  Instead I say nothing, and listen quietly to his stories. I have a lot of luggage.

Before Us There Was The Sea

Every time I land in a new country there is a period of transition; I’ve come to understand this now. A period where I miss the place I just left, struggle to figure out how to get to where I want to be, how to eat what I am hungry for, assess the prices of things in relative terms, scratch and shift uncomfortably in my new room. Such was the case in Zanzibar.

I arrived early in the morning off a red-eye. I was exhausted and dull. The air was thick with moisture. The sun was only just starting to inch above the horizon, but it was already hot. Africa hot. We used to say that as kids growing up in New York City on those unforgiving August days to describe our suffering in the weather – “it’s Africa hot.” We thought we were clever. Here in Zanzibar, I actually was in Africa, and it was actually Africa hot. I humped my luggage into my room and fell asleep.

When I come to shortly after noon, I shake off the sleep and step outside the hotel to survey the area. White sand stretches out to the horizon dotted with black reeds. Sea water pools along the coast line creating streaks of turquoise blue and moss green. Fishing boats sit abandoned in the sand. The tide is out. Far out.. At the horizon a strip of deep blue melts into the endless sky. The endless sky dwarfs the people beneath it. Dwarfs me. The world feels expansive. The air is still. Only the screeching of birds overheard reassures me that I haven’t stepped into a painting. There are no objects, only shapes. There are no inhabitants, only colors: turquoise, cream, black and green.

I walk slowly down the beach. Slowly because I am still tired and jet lagged, slowly because I am melting under the mid day sun, slowly because I am dumbstruck by the beauty stretched out in front of me and I need to take it all in.