Nairobi Dreaming - Complete!

Chapter 11: the dark side of yoga

After I awoke I thought mostly about Oakland. These were not organized thoughts. They were abrupt, disjointed snippets or thoughts that ran one into the next and they raced through my mind, the volume turned up way too high. I felt like I was shouting at myself.

I thought about my student, Draymond, and about running around Lake Merritt. This was not a good juxtaposition, not the kind of mishmash of images  that made me feel good about myself. There was Draymond standing at the front of the classroom after school practicing his poem, every word about what it had been like to see his friend die shotgunned out with raw emotion. And then, there I was sweating in the sunshine dressed head to toe in brand new Lululemon on my way to spend a hundred dollars on an overpriced brunch and bottomless mimosas with friends.

We had intersected for a moment, Draymond and I, but our lives were so fundamentally different that until it was me cradling him on the sidewalk it was all just art, a tv show, a thing that happened to other people, a beautifully wrought poem that made me feel something. And even then, even after I heard that he had died later in the hospital.....what impact had it all really had on me, if I was honest with myself?

I thought about the first time I had been near a shooting in Oakland. It was a Saturday night - suddenly people were running toward me and for some reason I ran toward them, instead of away. Then, the crack of gunshots, punctuating the night with exclamation marks... and still it took a moment for me to realize what was happening. It was the first time I had heard gun shots fired outside of a shooting range. A few weeks later I tried to google the shooting and got lost in the news of all the other shootings that had happened that I hadn't known about. I stared at the victim counts. Six shot. Five. Seven.

It didn't make sense. If any of this had happened in any one of the cloistered, disgustingly affluent neighborhoods I had grown up in that became apoplectic about unhealthy food options in private school cafeterias it would be front page news, wouldn't it?

I raged about it to my friends, full of righteousness. I knew all the right stats and all the right history to bring up to really work everyone up but the second I had had enough, I left on a first class flight to Nairobi so I could go and distract myself with a new adventure.

Because that was who I was and always had been. Someone whom other people thought of as a good person but whom was never really responsible for anyone or anything. I was too rich to be trapped and too weak to really fight.

I sat up, too warm to lie still. I hated myself in that moment, in the thick, humid dark. I was certain that if I stayed there I would scream and soI slipped out of the room, down the hallway and out onto the veranda. I curled up on the swing, in a fetal position, using my arm like a pillow and watched the dawn shatter the night, rising pink and gold over the mountains.

***

I must have fallen asleep because I woke up to the sensation of Atieno settling down on the bench next to me, a steaming mug of coffee wrapped in her hands. She was smiling slightly, her gaze trained on the horizon and I envied how happy she seemed just then. I inhaled the scent of green, woodsmoke and caffeine and tried to return to myself. I sat up.

"Morning!" She greeted me cheerfully, "You're certainly up early."

"You too."

"Well, I'm a morning person, always have been. Can't stay up past ten, can't really sleep in past 5 am."

She sipped her coffee with obvious relish and smiled broadly at me.

"So, tell me about yourself," Atieno said. "We're out here doing this thing together and we don't know each other."