Last weekend, I got really sick. Our house didn’t have running water either so without a working toilet, I spent Thursday night sprawled out on the kitchen floor between the fridge and the trash can, bracing onto the former’s white plastic sterility for comfort while puking into the latter.
I would go through fleeting periods of serenity and attempt to shake the unsettled feeling out of my stomach by getting up to walk around, only to be forcefully spasmed back to the trash can to assume my rigid position of convulsively purging hot remnants of the previous night’s side of food poisoning.
At about 6 AM, I realized I desperately needed water to drink, having run out of my personal water bottle supply. I had begun to feel a bit better so I changed into a pair of shorts, said goodbye to the security guard (my only human interaction of the night/day, albeit fleeting) and started walking down the dirty rocky road in my barely sturdy sandals.
I walked down our lane to arrive at an alley. I was used to everyone staring at me. I was of course an “obruni” (the Twi word for “foreigner” crowds seemed to yell at me), quite visibly not from here. Although, unlike my “white” counterparts, I had their dark skin, I still didn’t belong because I wasn’t part of their rich history. It was okay. I was used to sticking out. It was a bit comforting.
Greeted by a friendly shopkeeper, I bought 3 1.5 liter Voltic water bottles. I had a hard time juggling all of them back home, haunted by their sheer density coupled with lethal threats from my aching stomach.
The sun was beating down an incomparable golden hue as I, with my unseasonal (rather unregional) mustard-colored sweater, emanated a sickly version of the same hue. My glasses, blurry from too many fingerprints, kept slipping down the ridge of my nose, but with none of my fingers free to adjust them, I angled my head back up to catch their fall.
I paused for a second, then, to think. I was this little dot in West Africa at the moment; no one knew where I was. My muddy stomach was lurching on yet no one could hear the yelps but myself. Even I was distracted. My head was with a friend in New York City and another friend in Orange County. But that’s how it had been since my plane touched down in Accra: I was never really here.
Marinating in this daze of sick and hot, my stomach’s growls should have beckoned me to nowness and hereness. But when no one else really knew my here and now, was it even really happening?
I imagined the tweets I could produce about the occurrence, about my now disaffected state. The Twitter logo of the idealized bird suspended in motion danced in my mind as I imagined the 140 character statements I could compose as a meta-critique of my preoccupation to publicly record at a time like this:
ritu @jamesvandergeek
“Is life life only when recorded or shared? Do moments alone happen?”
Was my preoccupation with recording or sharing merely a byproduct of the social media generation? A generational preoccupation catered toward my online presence? Or was it just a greater human nature desire of clamoring to please the people around you, facilitated by the invention of social media?
One minute later, I could tweet:
“We are all such little people doing little things we don’t even notice other little people doing little things.”
What were my friends in Paris, Florence, New York City and Orange County thinking about at the moment? What were they doing? I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t.
Another minute later, I would tweet as a justification for these 140 character bounded statements of uncharacteristic lofty statements:
“Have to tweet these things bc I’m afraid to forget what walking around at 6 AM after puking my brains out feels like; the mind is so fickle”
Although the only world I could ever truly experience and attempt to understand was my own, I would probably forget this raw moment of my brain sensitive with little sleep, little human interaction and too much fluid loss, ever feeling to this sensation around me, moments after my brain stopped its hypersensitive trip.
I spent the next day vomiting more and then as a patient in a Ghanian hospital, but I still wasn’t really there. My mind was stuck in its own network of time and space: what others were thinking, what others were thinking of me. On the cold surface of the kitchen tile for a night, on the rocky dusty path for a few minutes, in my mind perpetually recording and sharing my life to ensure it’s real... or at least really happening.
(And that was my only actually tweeted tweet of the set: “perpetually recording life to ensure it’s actually happening” I think it did well, probably a couple retweets and favorites.)
