So this one time I fell in love with an ex-cheerleader. She was a tall and lanky woman from Wisconsin and had an accent vaguely reminiscent of a goose. She camped out overnight once to get a new N'Sync album the day it released. She told dirty jokes and always had a self-deprecating line at the ready. I didn't think I would have anything to say to her when we met. The first memory I have of her is standing up in front of a group of scrubbed down Peace Corps volunteers in an incongruously posh hotel conference room in downtown Philadelphia and confessing to thirty strangers that she had cried leaving her parents that morning.
When I was twenty-five I spent a year in China teaching English with the Peace Corps before being evacuated during the SARS epidemic. I chose to re-enroll and was sent to Madagascar, which is where I met T. Going back into Peace Corps was a hard thing to do. Choosing to re-enroll was easy. After a dizzy year in China, living like a celebrity on an inflated government stipend while working 14 hours a week was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. I wasn't ready for that experience to end so I eagerly dove back into the nostalgic dream of living in a hut somewhere tropical and digging latrines for the world's incapable poor.
The idea was nice, but the reality of being back in Peace Corps in a totally new country and with a completely different group of people was overwhelming. It felt like re-enrolling in high school. Staying in country during my first year in Madagascar, abandoned in some dusty waypoint in the middle of the arid south was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was the worst kind of déjà vu. I felt like I was doing something I had already done, but in a totally alien environment.
But so the cheerleader. She was the first person I remember meeting in the group of people I went to Madagascar with. I responded directly to that blunt first confession she made in front of the group. Then I dismissed her as a "type." She was a cheerleader. I don't date cheerleaders. I don't listen to N'Sync. A month later we got drunk and wound up hooking up.
For the next two years T was the emotionally unavailable one and I was sadly trying to swim upstream. It didn't work. I was in full freefall, trying to find something to keep me from abandoning my dream of digging latrines. It's easy for me to think of her as some kind of life raft I reached out to just to avoid having to leave country. Most of our friends in common believe I was deluded in thinking there was more.
Three years later she's in another country living with a square-jawed military man and I've moved on. But I still love her. I remember my flight out of Madagascar after having finished my time there. We shared a hotel room together the last night. We stayed out late and got drunk. We went to bed and didn't do anything. We laid side by side and fell asleep for a few hours. The car came to take me to the airport at 6am the next morning.
I emptied out my guts in Madagascar. I gave everything I had to give to the people in my village, and to T. It wasn't good enough. The best I got in my village was the nickname that has become my screen name here. I left behind some laminated drawings about proper nutrition in the local school. I lectured women on proper breast-feeding techniques, and I tried to tell people how to counsel friends with HIV that don't have access to medical treatment. And I fell in love with a cheerleader who never gave me anything back.
I remember sitting on the plane as we were ascending, pulling away from the land below and looking at pictures from the region where I had lived in the airline magazine. I started balling. It wasn't nice and quiet crying. My lower lip started shacking and soon my whole chin was spasming and I had to turn my head flush with the window so that nobody around me would see. I knew I would never go back to any of it. I knew that I would never get the shreds of myself that I had left behind. I felt a terrible gratitude, like a crushing weight pulling against the ascent. Everyone loses in the end. But being able to give it all away, to see bits of yourself drift off into an indifferent and alien world; Madagascar, a cheerleader. I felt like the luckiest asshole in the world.
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