Yeah, but Mercy, he lives on the other side of the ocean.

Mercy had Ibou memorized like a thin, cool sheen of perspiration enveloping her skin. At any moment, she could suddenly smell his long and lanky movements mingled with the dirty sea-salt air of Dakar. The smell of powdered clay mixed with man that she snuggled into every night before she drifted back to Africa in her sleep.

SALAAM BY ALISON GRIFA ISMAILI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 20

The morning light in her friend’s apartment was unreal and heavy like static snow on the television. Mercy watched smoke escape from the bright red rhombus of Waka’s lips, and for the first time, the impossibility of her own love story smacked her in the face. In her mind’s eye, Mercy recognized herself sitting across the greasy matchstick table, telling her story to her fumbling thumbs while dodging the skepticism in Waka’s eyes. She heard her own voice lilting and tumbling as in a little girl’s jump-rope song. She could see from the studious scowl of Waka’s face that her words sounded flimsy and nonsensical. So she talked faster, in hopes that velocity might somehow be mistaken for logic and articulateness.

“Yeah, but Mercy,” Waka interrupted, “he lives on the other side of the ocean.”

Mercy stared at the yellow plastic tablecloth, oily beneath her fingertips, telltale signs of pork belly ramen from the night before. It wasn’t the truth that stung her. Mercy was well aware of the fact that Ibou lived and would most likely continue to live on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Instead, it was the tiredness and resignation in Waka’s tone that needled into her ribcage. The way Waka spoke implied a sort of hopelessness, a certain amount of we’ve-been-here-before-ness that Mercy hadn’t been expecting.

A couple of weeks before, Mercy had arrived home, wiry, brown, and inspired, from a year-long work-study exchange in Senegal. She had taught mathematics and dental hygiene to orphans, while studying French and Wolof in a local language center.

Ibou, tall and dark and chain-smoking, lived and worked odd jobs in the dust and bustle of Dakar, some two thousand miles southeast of where Mercy now sat in Manhattan. Yet up until Waka’s incontestably true observation, Mercy hadn’t really considered the leagues of ocean between the United States and Senegal. Of course, she knew they were on different continents. On her return trip Stateside, she had dreaded the passing of every wave miles below the South African Airways flight. Even so, she never had a fleeting doubt that she wouldn’t soon return to the mother continent.

Ibou occupied a small space in her every neuron, and now that she was in New York, she couldn’t take a few steps without feeling her hand in his—down the stairwell of 310 Wadsworth, around the corner to Chase Bank, along the cookie aisle of the ghetto Key Food. Mercy had Ibou memorized like a thin, cool sheen of perspiration enveloping her skin. At any moment, she could suddenly smell his long and lanky movements mingled with the dirty sea-salt air of Dakar. The smell of powdered clay mixed with man that she snuggled into every night before she drifted back to Africa in her sleep.