The following text is taken from an article which describes the writer's experience of returning to her home country of Liberia, West Africa. Every day of those two weeks in Ghana, my soul ached to be home in Liberia. The ocean behind my room at the Afia Beach Hotel in Accra teased me with its flapping and rolling all day and night. But, this was not yet home, I told myself. I wanted to see Liberia again, where not only the ocean waves had survived a bloody war, where the sunshine also reigned, a home of lost ghosts and falling rockets, of runaways like us who had already been forgotten by the stay-at-home survivors, a home of lost youths, wandering the streets after their survival of one of the world's bloodiest wars, a home of tears and unimaginable stories of cruelty. I wanted to hug my father again, to see him in his old age, his gray hair that had defied death and time, to see my brothers again after the lost years of their youth, the war having sapped opportunities away from them. They were the younger ones, the ones that had not yet died in all of the after-war diseases and calamities. I wanted to cry and laugh with them, survivors who still needed answers. Today, I was on a Kenyan airliner. The plane was filled with others who had been away too long; they'd also been forgotten. Sitting next to me was a young woman looking younger than a teenager. Her light brown skin sparkled with beauty. She seemed a 'been to',¹ with a soft face made up to the letter, her smile, prepared. On her fingers were gold and diamond rings. Bracelets and fine linens draped around her arms as if she were some queen from a past world. She had ordered a huge perfume case from the airline's Duty Free catalogue, so the stewardess came looking for her. She pushed her hands from under the hajib² to receive the package from the beautiful Kenyan stewardess. She quickly opened the package to show it off to me. Pride took over her features as she examined the perfume, smiling at me. We were not yet introduced. She was only twenty-two, I would learn; and her English, simple and rough, very much in contrast to her appearance. She had not gone to school all these years, I thought to myself, yet, she looked schooled and well-kept. She quickly excused her attire: she was flying in from a far away country in the Middle East. 'I'm a real Liberian girl,' she smiled. She was coming in from Saudi Arabia where she had stationed herself comfortably with an Italian man. Her conversation was not brief. She pulled her hands out of her chiffon-laced hajib and other wraps every few minutes to speak with her hands even though I could understand Liberian English perfectly. She lived an arrangement, she said softly. The man was old, much older, but he took good care of her and her family. He was old enough to be her grandfather, she smiled. But that was okay. There was room, she said, for him to do what he wanted and room for her too, to move around in their arrangement. Here she was, she told me, flying back and forth whenever she wanted. She'd been everywhere, she said, everywhere in the Middle East and Africa. She was on her way to see her mother in Liberia, to give them gifts, to take care of those who had survived the years. With his money lavished on her, she could come twice a month if she wanted. She smiled, looking into my eyes as if for approval. I turned away to the window. I was in the window seat. I love window seats. Because of invitations to read and present my poetry, I am a frequent flyer around the US, and now, though less frequently, outside the US. I had taken to window seats over the last few years. They are my solace when I end up next to an annoying passenger – or a sweet little Liberian girl who had chosen the soft road through the rocky desert the war had set her on. I wanted to jump through that window today. I was angry – not at the girl, her mother, or her man. I was angry at the world, at the war, and at those who had brought this sort of calamity upon us. I was angry that such a beautiful, soft-skinned girl looking like my own daughter had given herself away to an old man because of the times, had sold herself into slavery. I kept looking through the window. I could not look at her now, I told myself. I turned away from the window and took her in my arms. She could have been my daughter, I thought. She held on tightly to me, tears rolling down her cheeks as I too, wept. ¹ ‘been to’: a well-travelled person ²hajib: veil or body covering