“If the war had not happened.”
I said: “If the war had not happened, we probably would have met in Liberia.”
“Are you sure?”
“Maybe,” I answered under my breath. “Our parents were very close friends. Still are. But before the war and everything. We met here, but we would have met there too. If everyone stayed.”
She nodded and stared.
At some point in my teens I became intrigued with the number 8, and the number 62 was close to her angular brown face on psychologytoday.com, so I chose her. K mentioned I should consider being more thoughtful about my choice, but “at least I went” I told K after my first meeting. “It’s weird. Talking to strangers about … my stuff. I don’t think it’s for me, but I’ll give it a shot.” A few months before, during my initial session on a cool Wednesday evening, I shared with the therapist my affinity for round numbers, and words, my appreciation of her lamp lighting, and, after some coercion, him. Her presence, her face, her voice were soft. I kept going back and eventually I did not mind having someone other than Mam or my sisters to pour into about things only they could know.
“What do you think the dream means?” the therapist asked after listening to ten minutes of my exact description of Satta and the details of that day.
“I don’t know. The fact that she was holding the oil like a baby in all of the dreams she’s shown up in is interesting. I’ve been thinking about going back,” I said.
“Where?”
“To Liberia. I haven’t been back since we left. No matter where we moved to, even when we were in Texas, I think I always knew I would go back.”
“That makes sense. And how long were you in Texas again?” She leaned back and wrote on her notepad.
“Since I was eight. Eight to seventeen. Then I moved back here for school.”
“I can imagine you’re curious to see how it’s changed. And to see your parents. It was a big change for them to move back after all these years. Brave.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“And you and your sisters and your younger brothers, you’re all adults now, of course, but it sounds like that was still a big transition.”
“It was. It is.”
“You told me last week that you ended your recent relationship. Correct?” she asked softly, almost purring, and I welcomed it. “And since your breakup you’ve been having these night …”
“Dreams,” I interrupted. “Yes.”
“Right. You seem to still care for him. Do you ever consider going back?” she asked, her back straightened.
I must have been shaking my head, facing the window, or have rolled my eyes, taking too long to answer.
“Is that an upsetting question?” she asked.
“No, it’s just … we weren’t a good match. If it were easy of course I would go back, but I’ve been sad because I know it wouldn’t be right, and he was like my family, so I lost a member of my family.”
“I see.”
“And the long distance. It’s awful. It’s not for me. I spend months at a time up there but how long could that go on for? There was no end in sight really. It made me feel like I was … running.” She nodded again. “But honestly, I’m beginning to believe I’ve been discouraged for other reasons. Not the breakup.”
“Yes, maybe. Leaving him was your choice,” she insisted and it flustered me. “As I listen to you, I keep hearing themes of loss. When you experience it, as you’ve explained, the nightmares from your childhood, triggered by your past traumas, return …”
“… I haven’t been having nightmares.”
“Well …”
“Just dreams. The woman, Satta. That’s nothing like the dreams I had when I was a kid.”
“Sure,” she said, returning to her purr, “I understand. But they are strange enough that they’ve caused alarm.”
“I didn’t experience trauma in the way you’re understanding it,” I interrupted again.
“Oh?”
“This isn’t one of those cases.”
“One of what cases?” she asked before we fell into a silence.
“I believe I had a happy childhood. That’s my point. I don’t think of trauma in that way. I don’t want to sound ungrateful or spoiled.”
“Recognizing pain is not ungrateful,” she said.
“Nothing horrible happened to me. At least I don’t think it did. I think I was lucky,” I managed to say without crying, although the tears lurked, menaced.
“Your family was tremendously fortunate to have made it out unharmed,” she said nodding.
“Mostly. My grandfather …”
“What happened to your grandfather?” Sixty-Two asked and waited.
“Rebels,” I forced out. “He left the village to get us food and medicine, and rebels killed him. They thought he was a Mandingo man. My mother’s family is Vai. He was very tall, and a Muslim, and he wore a kufi, so they thought he was Mandingo. And the Mandingo tribe sided with the Krahn people during the war, and even before, and the Krahn people were …”
“The president’s people, right?”
“Yeah. Samuel Doe’s people.”
There were few instances when I remembered saying his name out loud. It wasn’t until my twenties that I finally brought myself to watch the beginning of Doe’s taped assassination. I stared at my computer screen and recalled my childhood fantasies, the oblivion, the surprise I still felt in knowing this man, who for so long I imagined as a fire-breathing dragon, had a face, glasses, a human body, human tears.
“And the Mandingo and Krahn people, mostly government soldiers, were killing Gio and Mano people because of an old conflict when one of them almost overtook Doe’s administration. And there were other minor conflicts, of course, other motivations,” I said, trailing off the familiar recitation, something I’d memorized in high school to explain what had happened in my childhood country, to explain myself.
“But. My father and my grandmother worked overtime to protect us from trauma. The kind of trauma that would stem from that kind of carnage, you know?”
I watched her eyes carefully to see if she understood. If she was seeing me, or
