I was standing in the middle of the road wearing a sweaty tank top and a 30 liter backpack with my hand grasped in a stranger’s tight handshake. I had just been left alone in a city I had never been to with a mystery man who stopped me on the street. He insisted, rather […]

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Has something ever made you so terribly happy that your heart began to ache? I don’t mean in the poetic sense of the word. Not a sympathetic adjective. I mean a verifiable, physical throbbing, behind your sternum and slightly to the left. A happiness shaded with such broad strokes of love and longing and nostalgia […]

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In an air conditioned van, we hurdled down the long road that winds from the west of Zanzibar to the southeastern coast. As the journey progressed over an hour and a half, we watched as the raucous city life playing out just beyond 4 millimeters of glass faded into a world of pastoral requiescence. The […]

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It was absurd, really. How fated it was. A friend of mine called it a coincidence, but I know it had to more than that… I walked into a restaurant and as a single human, dining alone, I got sat at a small table that was already occupied by two others. I wasn’t sure if […]

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Somehow, I have the great fortune of currently living on the peninsula in the striking city of Dar es Salaam. The apartment I’m hosted in by my kind friends features a yard filled with palm trees and exotic flowers and a deep, saltwater pool that I spend every afternoon in. Beautiful coastlines, yummy restaurants, novel […]

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I wake up sweating. The sun pouring through my window is new and unfamiliar and conspicuously yellow; like a child has drawn thick, waxy rays into my room with a Cornsilk Crayola crayon. The chickadees outside are putting on a show, whistling melodies that are foreign and exotic, even to my fairly well traveled ears. […]

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