and if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again...

Non ignara mali. Miseris sucurrere disco.
(the exiled queen dido to shipwrecked aeneas "i'm not ignorant of misfortune, i'm learning to help those in misery")

what the two of us have in common is knowing the feeling of waking up washed up on the shores of dreams, and how hard it is to first sit up then clear your head. towards the end of the school year, teacher and student, a decrepitude enters our morals and our will to leave the bed. (for the children it's easier because their beds are uncomfortable and next to the kitchen fire and three brothers smashed up to you) standing naked before a bucket of cold water (you are supposed to wash with this), shaven and washed, before 60 noisy 13-year-olds (you need to keep them occupied for the next 1.5 hours)

a sign outside tells patients that they do in fact have rights. for example, they should be given a receipt when they give money, they have the right to ask for the doctor, and the nurses are not allowed to shout at them. maimuna is talking on the phone and the nurse is sticking a thick needle in her gracile vein "ah ah ah. .... non, c'est qu'ils me piquent." drifts in and out of sleep, high on codeine. we go out and have a dinner of cow foot and tomato sauce with cheap draft beer, sweating. we come back and uncork a bottle of marquez de chivas, drink from plastic cups with a few of her cousins, sitting on the floor in a room buzzing with fulfulde electric fans french pidgin, breathing... on a muslim prayer mat we sweat and sip the wine. the tradition is to have a wake for someone who is not dead yet and not going to die, though they would have liked to kill her. she listens to prayers, complains of numb or itching hands, depending on how long since the last injection, tells the story thrice, vomits twice, accuses jerry of checking out her cousin ("she likes very much men, you know") then falls asleep.