Letter to My Seven-Year-Old Self

Note: After a great deal of procrastination, I bring to you another sample of my experiences in Africa. It might be two or three months before I write the next piece on Côte d’Ivoire, so enjoy. If you haven’t already read the initial installment, I Am Seven, I recommend you check that one out as well.

Voila, seven-year-old me at school (in Africa)

 

Dear Seven-Year-Old Me,

I know that it’s difficult for you, going back to Africa now that you’re older, now that you’ve had almost two years to build friendships with your fellow students here in America. Naturally, you don’t want to leave them behind for ages and ages, only to find them grown and strange when you return. But I also know that you’re excited as well because, at this point, Africa is still one of your biggest memories, and you’ve been a little lonely since none of your friends have been able to relate to your previous experiences.

Despite how eager you are to get home, you were three when you went over the first time, hardly old enough to understand or worry about the huge cultural leap you were making. And now that you have finally begun to adjust to America, you have to leave again. You have to go back to the place that rejected you like a body rejects a virus. In so many ways, you feel like a ping-pong ball, bouncing back and forth across the little net in the middle of the table. You just want to land somewhere and rest.

Soon enough, you will, but not yet. And I’m sorry that you have to go through so much in the meantime. I promise you’ll be okay.

First of all, the trip over is going to get…interesting. In Liberia, two men will board your plane, claiming to seek asylum. For whatever reason, they will rip up their papers (visas and such, I imagine), but they will get caught. It’s going to be super scary, hearing them yelling as the authorities drag them past you up to the cockpit while the plane you sit in flies through the air, suspended on two flimsy bits of metal, so breakable. At the time, you’ll be watching a movie, and the harsh transition between fiction and reality will jar you. So much so, that, by the time you finally land in Côte d’Ivoire, you’ll be shaken and wishing for the familiar.

Hang in there.

After spending the night at the home of a kindly woman (who blesses your heart because you’re so sleepy) and an extroverted man (who wears a cowboy hat and defends your luggage from thieves), you’ll find yourself packed into a hot, tight car for the long trip to Yamoussoukro (Yakro for short). Your excitement will return and then grow on that long stretch while the red dirt plains and the towering ant hills streak by in your periphery.

More than anything, you won’t be able to stop thinking about that music box you left behind the first time. You’ll remember picking it out from the Mission Barrel (a place where missionaries drop and swap). It was like digging up gold from a slag heap of old clothes and angry hornets. That music box is perhaps your most valued possession, and years down the road, you still won’t have the slightest clue why. All the while you’ve stayed in America, the fact that you didn’t rescue it earlier has eaten at you. I realize you already know this—of course you do, since your very first thought on learning you were going back to Africa was that you could reclaim that music box (your second thought, of course, centered around how much you’d miss your cousins)—but I had to say something.

So, the music box will consume your mind as you make headway to your old home, that building that still stands safe and sound, filled with all your belongings, untouched by the locals, just waiting for you. Along the way, you’ll remind your sister multiple times that, when you arrive, the music box is yours and yours alone. She can’t have it—in fact, you’ll prefer it if she didn’t even touch it. (The thought of her picking it up first will really bother you.) All you’ll think about is lifting that lid with the little glass window in it and winding the key so you can watch the flimsy plastic dancer with her raised arm and her wisp-of-lace skirt spin while the music tinkles out.

But, horror of horrors, the car you’re riding in will break down, and you’ll be forced to wait ages and ages—itching—no, dying—in anticipation while your driver (the cowboy-hat-wearing, luggage-saving, missionary man) figures out what to do. Fortunately, a flatbed tow truck will happen along and rescue you. Even though it’s probably super dangerous, after they hitch your vehicle onto the back of theirs, you’ll ride inside the car on the last stretch to Ivory Coast’s capitol city.

As an aside, here, Lizzie, it’s going to bug you when you research Côte d’Ivoire later and find that some cartographers are under the illusion that Abidjan is still the capitol of Ivory Coast. Take comfort in knowing that the presidential palace is in Yakro, not Abidjan, which means—no matter what people might say to the contrary—the official capitol is Yamoussoukro. And that’s where you live, where your music box waits for you. So let’s get back to that.

Strange though it may seem, you’ll feel a little sad when you burst through the blue gate that leads from the courtyard to your yard, as you fly down the stone path to the house you remember so well and yet don’t. For one, your faithful German shepherd won’t be there, and you’ll feel a pang at that. You miss her, so you have to remember that it isn’t your fault she’s dead, even though you can’t shake the notion that it is. Seriously, it’s not your fault that the vet gave her cow-sized shots which made her sick and sore. Of course you’d wanted to comfort her—who could blame you?—and it wasn’t your fault you petted her right on the spot where they gave her the medicine (and got chomped for your trouble). Later, after you’d left the continent, when she ran out into the street because she didn’t want to go to the vet, it wasn’t your fault the taxi killed her. So don’t beat yourself up about it.

I’m telling you this because you’ll find Africa to be a surprisingly emotional place this time around. First of all, there’ll be a weird drop from the giddy adrenaline high you’ve been riding on for the past day or so. On top of that, some of your friends from before won’t be coming back, and you’ll have to adjust to a bunch of new faces in your little missionary community. You’ll find that you won’t slide back into the old groove of things the way you expect to. You’ve grown and changed as a person since the last time you were here, so you can’t expect everything to be the same.

Sure, the walls in your house will still be peeling, (and you’ll remember—with fondness—how you would often pull the paint off and then eat the chips to hide the evidence). You’ll have some cleaning to do, since ants have built their nests in papers and under furniture. You’ll find you’re almost too big for your bike. You’ll find the dark shadows around the edges of your yard, where the trees shade the grass and the shed presses close to the wall, will frighten you far more than they did before. Nothing will seem quite so innocent anymore.

You’ll be shocked by how homesick you get. At first, it won’t be all that strong, just the normal stuff. And you’ll tell yourself it will pass. But it won’t, not really. Though you’ll enjoy spending time with your friends, even the bright spots will get lost in the gloom far too often for your taste. You’ll discover just how thick and black that strange, seemingly inexplicable loneliness will become. Unfortunately, you won’t really realize until much later that the new medication you’ll be taking to prevent malaria comes with some nasty psychological side effects. That stuff will give you vivid, vivid nightmares. It will, in fact, forever change the way you dream—even when your sleep is sweet. Though the effects aren’t as permanent, the medicine will also intensify and warp all your waking emotions. Let’s face it, you’ll be tired to begin with, and some of your dreams will feature your worst fears (like coming back to the US after being away for ten years only to find that your cousins are all grown up and singing in rock bonds and they have no clue who you are). So you need to brace yourself for that, and always remember, stuff won’t be as bad as it’s going to seem.

As much as you can, try to focus on the cool stuff, the way the mission community will play capture-the-flag in the dark—the way you’ll have potlucks—the way your best friends will be British and Northern Irish (and those won’t be the only nationalities). You’ll study French, and you’ll love it so much, you’ll try to teach it to your Dad’s African friend even though he already speaks the language fluently (rest assured, he’ll still humor you because he’s sweet like that). Though it would probably break about a thousand American safety regulations, you’ll get to play in a giant, human-sized hamster wheel in the school playground (safety is for wimps). One day, your father will bring home a dead, headless viper, and he’ll take pictures that make it look like it’s attacking him. You’ll get to visit a zoo at a gas station and a restaurant with a deer living indoors, and you’ll get to play at a pizza place that has a tree growing up through the ceiling and a stream cutting off the corner of the yard with a swing set on the other side. Could it really get much better than all that?

Unfortunately, you won’t get to bring that music box home with you, and even when you’re much older than you are now, that loss will bother you far more than it should. (In fact, you’ll probably always get the urge to cry when you see a music box.) But you’ll bring home a collection of memories and pictures instead, vivid and sure, unfading; even though sometimes you’ll wish to just forget it all, because it will hurt—it will hurt so much to let go, to look but not touch.

So please, I know you’ll be homesick and sad, and I know you’ll be scared and a lot of things won’t make sense. You’ll be growing up, and that hurts just by itself. But the clock starts when you set foot on African soil, and you’ll only have three months to reacquaint yourself with this life before you lose it again. You’ll never be able to recreate the comradery that you’ll find there—the way a bunch of different nationalities can band together, and yes, disagree about how to do the dishes and whatnot. But you have it good now, and you won’t even realize that until later, when you find that America is so much colder, in more ways than one.

Don’t be too sad. Please have fun. Take notes and remember everything. You won’t get another chance like this. Soon, all you’ll think about is wanting to leave Africa, but when it comes time to go, you’ll realize too late that you want so badly to stay.

Don’t waste the time you do have.

Love,

Liz

 

Note: The main bombing described in I Am Seven took place on November 6, 2004. We left the country shortly thereafter, and while we originally planned to return to Africa—this time as missionaries to Guinea—we chose to take several years off from missionary work instead. During our break, we learned of political unrest in Guinea and decided to remain permanently stateside.

The Inner Editor's Monologue

Dear Liz,

We need to talk. I don’t appreciate what you did to me this November, the way you locked me up in the basement of your mind and shoved socks in my mouth to stifle my criticisms. For thirty days, you spent your time lollygagging and procrastinating and pretending to write worthwhile stuff. On and on and on it went. But while you drank your coffee and ate your chocolate and thought your happy noveling thoughts, I lay there in that dark corner of your memory, brooding as the taste of footwear filled my mouth with the cottony reminder that we are very different, you and I. As you pounded away at the keys, writing painful prose, I rocked myself and recited Tennyson in hopes of sparing my sanity. Whether or not I succeeded is still a valid question. So thank you, for that.

All December you avoided your novel, letting it ruminate as you sang Christmas carols, wrapped Christmas presents, and baked Christmas pies. But while you were busy counting down the days, I was channeling Houdini. For a while, I may have been the Count of Monte Cristo, imprisoned for ages on an island, worn down to a mere shadow of myself. But I’m back now. Be afraid.

January 1^st was the key that finally opened the lock of my confinement. As you sat in the living room, eating cake and watching Doctor Who, I crept in and joined you on the couch, unnoticed. Perhaps you cherished notions of escaping your writerly fate, of penning a rough draft and then leaving it to rot while moving on with your life. I’m sorry to say, it will never be as easy as all that. I am your curse—I am your ghost. I will follow you to the ends of the earth, the voice of the many books you have abandoned. Unlike your conscience, I will never let up.

Let me tell you something vital. I bet you thought wandering into the badlands of your rough draft, if you ever did choose to return of your own accord, would be as delightful as strolling down the Yellow Brick Road en route to Oz. But honey, the only walk you’ll be taking is into Mordor, and it will be just you and me and the Precious (otherwise known as your manuscript). You may go crazy; in fact, I’m counting on it. Art, by necessity, mandates blood, sweat, and tears. So does perfection. And you are so very far from either right now.

Style, you argue. Style is a matter of taste and perspective. Everyone has their own style. George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare. I’m sorry you cherish these childish notions. It will only make this more difficult for you in the long run. From now on, MY style is law. Hemmingway might like that despairing passage over there, but I am not Hemmingway, so in the bin it goes. Poe might have been proud of that dramatic moment, but I feel very differently, and you’ll trash it if you know what’s good for you. Write with the rhythm of Ray Bradbury—then we can talk about style. I hope you see how this is going to work. If you’re having second thoughts, I’m sorry; it’s a little too late for those. The doubters warned you, didn’t they, before you started all this nonsense? Of course they did. It’s not my fault you ignored them.

You’re locked in forever, and you’ll do as I say. See, I let you have your fun, traipsing through November without a care in the world, heaping up work for me. Now it’s my turn. Now it’s my chanced to be unleashed, and unlike you, I am merciless. I do not spare sentences for their beauty or scenes for their potential. I do not see promise; I see words. And if I do not see good words, I hit delete. If your beautiful darling doesn’t add one jot to the plot, then the plot won’t miss your beautiful darling if I cut her lifeline and snip her string of words from the page. You’ll feel better, in time, I promise you. How can I say that? Because I know. This is the part you always forget, no matter how many forays you’ve made into the stormy waters of my territory, be it with essay, blog, or book in tow. But I always remember.

Once upon a time, we used to be friends. For a while there, not a day went by when we weren’t spending every spare moment you could dredge up counting rows of letters and marveling at how the pieces fell into place with gentle tweaking. We lay on the grassy lawn of your consciousness and studied the clouds and the stars, weaving stories out of thin air, delighting in the mayhem of the axe and the precision of the scalpel in refining words into wonder. We were more than a team; beyond the cliché, we truly were two halves of the same soul.

What happened? After all those late nights when I fed you ideas till your fingers caught fire trying to keep up, I expected to make an impression…somehow. When you vowed to live like this for the rest of your life, I assumed you meant to include me. But summer came and stole your novel from you and thrust you into work and reality. You came back slimmer and tanner and bouncier, but you were still you. As soon as you could, you rushed back to the computer screen, bursting with lively plans to finish the project we had started together, you and I. And we did. We finished.

Then I slipped from your mind altogether, like a Post-It® note without its stick. And I was crushed. What did I do to make you hate me?

When did I become your enemy?

Listen. I know relations between us have been strained. Maybe I brought that on myself. Maybe I was too harsh in my search for brilliance, and maybe I trampled you on the way to perfection. Honestly, I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know how to fix it. But can we call a truce, even if it lasts no longer than the Treaty of Versailles? Can we lay aside our differences and work together? At least once more, can we make it work?

Your hands are shaking—your trembling fingers flutter through the pages of a book—your book. Of course…you’ve been reading your rough draft on the sly, dragging yourself deeper and deeper into discouragement; you can’t face the jarring horrors without me. Please let me help you.  

Sincerely,

Your Inner Editor

Dear Self of October 31, 2013

There’s a shelf in your house, crammed with old writings—all those relics from before you learned to love the feel of keys beneath your fingers.  And there’s that massive cardboard box in your closet, too, so ratty it’s spilling its papery guts.  Of course, you covered it with sweaters to conceal the carnage of your failures.  All those hundreds of stories you started but never finished.  They were your children—and you abandoned them.  Each one you started with breathless wonder, but after the spark died and the actual work began...they just weren’t good enough for you anymore.  True, maybe they have faces that only a mother could love, but you never gave them the chance to be otherwise.  Shame on you.  You’ve sealed a thousand souls to their doom because they lacked perfection, because you got bored, because you reached for other, starrier horizons. 

Yeah, you never did like to think of yourself as a quitter, but the evidence is overwhelming.  When it gets hard, you give up.  When you get tired, you move on.  Days pass in a futile progression of endings with no beginnings to follow.  You do nothing more than dream.  Still, you need to write to sort through the happenings and the undoings of your existence.  Meanwhile every library you enter and every book you touch and every printed page you read mocks you.  You know inside yourself that you will never be as great as all the others. 

Sometimes you imagine your not-so-distant future, flipping burgers to support your meager, hand-to-mouth existence while you repeat the same old phrases like a broken record.  Another year and I’ll have it done—I’ll have finished.  Another year and I’ll be rich, I’ll be famous.  One more year.  That’s all I need.  But despite the constant flurry of beginnings your mind generates as it panics—those last few flails of a drowning person—nothing marvelous happens.  Oblivion is when your most cherished thoughts are forever lost to the world. 

You have lived this way since you were an enterprising seven-year old.  You’ve tasted dreams and spouted dreams and dreamed dreams—you have stumbled along roads paved with yearnings, and you have walked amidst a flurry of print. 

Sometime next month you’re going to realize something.  You’ll be sitting on a couch, drinking coffee, tapping away at yet another novel, and you’ll see the years ahead of you—you’ll see yourself living to be an old woman full of regrets, and you’ll note how that would make an excellent book.  And that’s when you’ll realize that stupid, simple something.  You have deluded yourself.  Years have passed as you sat at the computer, waiting for genius to come, waiting for that one strong caffeine jolt to send fire through your veins—for that one hot hour when you type like mad and churn out an entire masterpiece and seven sequels.  You’ve expected success to be quick and easy with no muss, no fuss, no mess. 

But during this month, this National Novel Writing Month, make yourself write even when you hate every moment of it, even when the spark dies after the third day and your cynical side tells you there is nothing to do but cut your losses and move on.  Be stubborn.  Just this once, I’m giving you permission to deny your better judgment.  By December 1^st you’ll have 160K words of junk—pure and utter junk.  Those scenes you loved while you wrote them, even they will read like the discombobulated ramblings of a five-year old.  You will review your work and wonder if it was all for nothing, if you’ve come this far only to fail now.  Promise me this though—promise me you’ll set your teeth and roll up your sleeves and dig into that dirt-pile anyway.  Because I happen to know that you’ll cut everything and you’ll rewrite everything and you’ll obsess over everything.  When you get your MS back from your mom and D., well, you’ll slaughter it all over again.  It will hurt.  I won’t lie to you.  But listen to me when I say that it will be worth it—all those gut-wrenching, heart-aching moments will be worth it.  Even if no one ever grabs your book from a store shelf and catches a light in their eyes.  Because you need this.  You.  Need.  This.  You need to know that you’re more than just a quitter, that you won’t go through life always giving up when it gets hard.  Life is hard. 

Stop waiting for someday.  You won’t suddenly wake up with a finished novel waiting in a box beneath your Christmas tree.  It won’t be a lark.  It is work.  It is terrible, soul-breaking work, and I can’t even tell you how miserable it will make you half the time, how you will habitually avoid your laptop because you won’t always be able to stand what you see on that page.  Again and again you’ll have to face how inadequate you are, how nothing of your supposed genius stands up to scrutiny.  If you had known this when you were younger, you would have chosen a safer job, like weapons manufacture.  But now that you’ve come this far, there will be no escape.  You’re stuck, honey.  Make the most of it. 

Best Wishes,

Your 2014 Self.