Savanna

My room is on the sixth floor of a dormitory. It’s a sunny space of four hundred square foot, on the other side of our building facing the Hawaiian wind. The wind runs over the seas, flows over our ever-green mountains, ruffling the valleys and enters our dorm rooms through windows and tiny cracks. It enters our dusty, red stone corridors with a loud whistling noise and flows around our legs. When Savanna enters the room in her pink top and torn denim shorts, she brings the breeze with her into my dreams. She has dark sparkling eyes like the night sky. I know that it’s a clichéd metaphor, but some days when she is feeling talkative, and she goes on excitedly describing her country, she gets that far off look in her eyes. Slowly she stops talking and switches on her notebook. After a few minutes, they go blank and start staring at the screen with no emotion. But, once you see the feeling in those eyes, you cannot compare them to anything but a vast universe hidden behind the darkness of the night, sparkles of emotion lighting them up and fading suddenly. There is something inside her that keeps struggling to come out. Once in a while, she tries to put words to those feelings. Like when she told me, “Our house has a red-tiled roof and we have white bougainvillea running all over it.” I understand how small those words seem when written here. But it’s the long silence that followed after the sentence, which told me the most. That was when I knew that she was just as lost as me. I never voice myself. I smile, all the time. The feeling that someone’s watching me never subsides. So, there’s no way that she knows. But, I feel her. From the day I met her, I always have.