In the malaria ward at the pediatric hospital, the doctor recites the status of the children. This one is emerging from coma. This one is doing much better. They have quinine drips and transfusion bags, sometimes an IV stand shared between two patients. At one bed, a father, dressed meticulously in a kaftan, stands perfectly still beside his daughter. I’m not sure he understands the French.

This is, for selfish reasons, a hard place for me to be. Outside the ward, in the open-air hall, I lean against the wall and try not to think about why.

I handwash clothes in a plastic tub on the floor of my bathroom while my laptop dials up Air France. The reservation agent greets me as I consider the dustiness of the wastewater. There is the sound of dripping, then the sound of her accented English, reverberating a bit in the bare tiled room. There are salamanders on the walls. This world is a contradictory place.

The first time I rode a motorbike taxi through a West African capital was in early December, over five years ago, in Lagos. I was giddy with infatuation, overwhelmed by the city’s frenetic crush of yellow busses and packed bridges and industrial edges crumbling into urban fishing villages. I wore heavy wood earrings that morning, a gift to myself in a market in Johannesburg a week before. When the bike hit the smooth roads of Victoria Island and picked up speed, I had to take my hands off the seat to press the earrings against my neck.

So here I am again, in a long skirt, on the back of a cheap motorbike, heading toward the river. In this country, I’m shouting broken French to the driver, who is also my friend. Speeding through cities this way– without a helmet, the heat of the exhaust at my heels– must be one of my great loves. We join the traffic over the bridge.

The city smells like diesel and dust, exactly as I expected it to.

As evening falls, I stand in my courtyard and watch the driver haggle over a small pile of fake Nokias that another man has brought in. I buy a phone. The guard stands a few feet from his motorbike, turns away, and performs ablutions. At ten minutes to eight, somewhere in this quartier of the city, the muezzin begins the call to prayer.

On this continent again, finally. Tonight I’m in a university guesthouse at the top of a hill: stucco walls and dusty shelves, bars of fluorescent lights at the ceiling. Astonishingly, there is an Internet connection. And, in the courtyard, a guard who sleeps beside his motorbike. I had forgotten about the guards.

At the end of the day, we stand barefoot in my third-floor room, the June light filtering through the blinds. I fold my hand around his jaw– he’s got a great jaw, a lovely mouth. He speaks with a Canadian raising, the vowels are all funny to me, but his voice is gentle. I am more myself here than I have been for a long time. Tomorrow night, I leave for Africa. We make the briefest of plans and no promises.

Somewhere north of Washington, we pause. From my window, the thin woods of central Maryland are deeply green under morning sun. Across the aisle, a freight train passes in flashes of blue-black and rust and gold. It clangs rhythmically and no one speaks. In my bag I carry a passport with a new visa to west Africa, a covered bowl of warm oatmeal, yesterday’s blue dress. Remember this: the hey, are you awakes of early morning, a mug of coffee in the old diesel car, the late spring heat still unbroken by rain. An afternoon secreted away in a museum. His height is new to me; I take his hand somewhere in the marble corridor and pull it behind my back.

Somehow, I’ve gotten here again: leaning across a table in a basement bar to hear him, pulling my hair into a ponytail, drinking my beer, letting my hair out, pulling it up. I cannot sit still.

I’m running this spring, which is what I always do at times like these, grateful for the uphill under trees, the return at dusk, the sureness of my feet finding landing, the cars beside me and no one else. My feet are calloused; at the bar, I rub my toe over my ankle and try to remember everything he says.

I suddenly want to talk about elegiac poetry and memorials, and I regret not knowing the names of trees or the title of the Alice Munro story with the rabbit running in the headlights of the car. I’m twenty years old again, astonished with the romance of expression, craving late nights and long mornings, creating the memory of the mouth of another person. And I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov, as I did in Dublin (finishing it in a coffee shop on my way home from work), as I did in Lesotho (reading in a cemetery at the edge of the valley), as I do at about this time of the year.

The evening run from my house, around the inner-city lake. It’s the kind of city where one shouldn’t run after dark. It’s been windy all month, and tonight the wind is pushing the water around the lake, the leaves are already flipped silver side up, the big flat clouds reddish black. I’m alone on my lap, but there’s a bicyclist heading in the other direction, then a man on rollerblades skating slowly backwards over this one perfect road.

I run home in the dark, up the concrete steps, have to shove the old wood-framed door open. The front steps rise beside the sunroom. The sunroom is beautiful: eight long windows set into the greystone; narrow wood floor. The lights are on and he’s on the couch, he’s reading something, he sees me coming.

Spring has left me restless, as it always does. This first hot day, I pushed the eighty-year old windows of this house outward against their winter stuck. I sat on the back porch until dark, drinking wine and watching the cats prowl the cracked concrete alley. A plastic garbage can lid scraped across the ground and the wind carried new smells: faint rotting garbage and fruit trees blossoming.

When I can’t sleep, I walk across the wood floors of the bedroom, the office, the stairs, through this stone house of narrow floorboards scratched and worn and warm under my bare feet. All night, there are sirens somewhere.