Kampala

It’s funny how a smell or a fog or the energy in a room can transport a person to another place mentally and bring forward a flood of buried memories and unexpected emotion. I went back to Kampala for a few seconds this morning, and my heart ached again for that city that was so strange and beautiful in all of its grit and mystery. It was the heavy fog I walked through on my way to work and the way the wet air smelled like diesel and burning garbage and clung to my skin and made my hair frizz. Rain that had pooled through the night in gutters and in the crevices of leaves drip, drip, dripped onto the sidewalks and warm streets. Honking horns and big barreling trucks on Eighth Street, and a lone bird’s squawking from some unknown treetop sounded distant and eerie cutting through the weight of the damp air, the way the acoustics of a rainy jungle make everything sound wild. It was the way the wet gravel ground and spit under my shoes as I walked down the middle of the street. Everything was drenched and dirty and noisy, and I was fully and unusually aware that the world had been awake and moving for hours already, though I had just woken up to start the day. For some reason, it all took me back there to the morning we arrived in the humid dark to that city on the other side of the earth, and, for a moment, I was aware again of the rest of the world.