A long night in Dakar, full of dark thoughts. The hard times don’t come often here, but when they come they come hard, without the traditional safety nets of home.
I fall asleep around 5:30am, but it’s the kind of sleep that feels dangerous, menacing. I dream that Mallika and I are walking through some back-neighborhoods in a city that looks like a darker, more broken version of Dakar. We stop to give someone a few coins and then keep moving, but there are suddenly many kids around us, grabbing at my shirt, my hands. They’re saying that someone is sick and we need to give more. The sound of a crying baby in the background becomes overpowering.
I try to wave the kids off but feel something pulling me down, and realize with frightening clarity that one of the kids has poisoned me, somehow put a spell on me, and I cannot fight it. I am going down. I lose my vision.
And then I wake up, rigid, fully aware, terrified. The mosque is muttering and if there are spirits in the city, this is their time.