“I want to know you,” you said to me once, and the heat rose up my spine. “I want to see you,” you said, in case I had missed your first statement. “Do you understand?” I did understand, but pretended I didn’t get it. I felt so wound up around you I didn’t know what to do but wait it out until the end of training when I would shipped to a faraway village and rarely see you. I haven’t known how to explain this, only that I needed to get to know you more slowly; I needed to know the language better and not be so new to Benin.
No one is guarded or unguarded for no reason. There is a game in the United States called tag, and this game teaches you that a touch can freeze you and another kind of touch can unfreeze you. Where I come from, girls are sometimes treated like a game, like that time two boys I knew pulled me away from a party, where music was playing, and I was dancing.
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