Sparklebright

She had the brightest smile. Bright like whites in the summer sun. Bright like kittens purring against your hand. Bright like nothing bad had ever happened. 

It has been so many years I can’t tell you how we started talking, or what mental or physical state I was in when we did. It was after my accident. My head was bandaged but I don’t know how far into the AZT I was. I don’t remember how sick I might have been. Only that when I remember it now, through the gauzy haze of nostalgia and toppled into the memory pit of a time, I can see her smiling as bright as anything, laughing as lightly as dandelion fluff. 

My trauma was obvious. Written all over my face with bandages, spiky stitches, and the constant nausea for my post exposure prophylaxis (a precaution against the unknown origin of the hospital needles). And if it were later, and the stitches were already gone, then my trauma was still obvious, with a raw jagged line running through a patch of shaved scalp. 

Her ailment was her secret to tell. 

We sat on a bench I think, waiting for appointments? Lingering after appointments? Sharing the same bed and breakfast? I can’t recall details; only that we talked and shared and laughed.

I have a memory of her joyful description of her house in Malawi. Her washing clothes in the doorway. Even talking about the mundane chores of rural Peace Corps life seemed pleasant with her, not in the obnoxious way where you want to shove a sponge in someone’s face, but in the…hmmm, I should try it her way, kind of way.

We talked about her travels. About making friends and keeping in touch. We talked about the difficulties of having no shared language. This was before google translate or babblefish. This was us sitting in a country whose internet, I was sure, was run by a lone hamster dying of thirst on a rusted out wheel.

I don’t remember exchanging addresses. How could I remember that when I can’t remember where she fits between the first time I threw up (from the smell of dinner -it didn’t matter that I was starving -my body heaved in revolt and I remained famished) and lying on the floor of my assistant Peace Corps Director’s office, under the air conditioning for 8 hours at a stretch for the sake of cooling my nausea. She is in there somewhere- a shining beacon, a moment when maybe I wasn’t fixated on sickness or pain.

I returned to my village a moth after my accident. Thinner. Weaker. Skittish of loud noises and sudden stops. I made my rounds in my village. Reacquainted people with me, attempted to find my place in the now strangely foreign place that until weeks before, had been my home. 

Sometime later – in my head it is February but that isn’t right because I’d been home barely a week by that point- I got a package in the mail. Inside were bath salts “for my bucket bath” …sweet smelling reminders of home. Beneath those envelopes wrapped in plastic bags, was a bag of marshmallows. 

Sitting in the Peace Corps doctor’s office, comparing Malawi to South Africa, sharing the yearnings of youngish people so far from home tangled in with adventures and lamentations…she remembered. She remembered what I said I longed for so far away from familiarity and the comforts of home. 

Through the mail, across the miles, her so removed from the sub-Saharan life we had discussed and shared…she remembered me. She remembered me and mailed me a piece of home.

Fifteen years later, the thought of her still makes me attempt a smile as bright as hers.