For Palesa

Palesa will not see this, but I put it here for her because I have been thinking of her all day and there is nothing else I can do.

I found this chestnut in its bright green husk last week. I brought it home and left it on my coffee table, and each day the husk changed color, darkened, reddened. This morning I woke, dreaming I was having a conversation with Palesa, and when I came into the living room, the chestnut had burst open.

Palesa came into my life in 1992, a week after I arrived in Lesotho. She was then eight years old. Eventually her mother, an alcoholic, surrendered her for adoption and I adopted her. She lived with me for nine years, in Lesotho, then in South Africa, and finally in the USA, where she was desperately unhappy. She missed her culture. She felt guilty for leaving her sister and her mother. She was subject to rages, pathologized in the USA as fetal alcohol syndrome and bipolar syndrome. She was hospitalized numerous times in psych wards and mental hospitals, and after one exploratory trip back to her old home in 2000, she finally decided, in 2001, that she had to go back. I let go, with love and with grief beyond anything I had ever known.

In the dream from which I woke this morning, she was saying to me what she often did say to me: "I hate school. In school they say I am slow. I can't remember things. It's true. I hate being slow. I feel so ashamed of being slow."

In my dream I said to her this morning what I never found words to tell her when she lived with me: You are fast, Palesa. You are fast to smile, to sing, to laugh; you are fast to help anyone who needs you; you are fast to listen, to sympathize, to understand another's hurt. You are fast to give your toys to other children, to see beauty, and to comment on the beauty you see. "Look!" you say, so fast. You are very fast, Palesa.

More of her story is here. I last saw her on October 28, 2010. I have sent her letters and packages since then, but I have received no word of her. I sit with that.