The end of a story is what kills me and gives me nightmares. I put an end to a story on paper with a feeling of emptiness, like post-partum despair. As if I have given birth to a baby and then have to walk away and let it be, to let it grow, without the Oedipal angst of love and hate and fear that I could have shared with my son, my daughter, or my adoptive ones.

Many stories come to my mind; stories of love, death, life, hope . . .

Love. I could write about the first woman I ever fell in love with. Theresa. Beautiful as the sky that covered her the first time I realized that she was a woman.

It was a smile. But she is still somewhere . . . she would not want me to write about her. About how I clumsily kissed her, how I clumsily tried to take hold of her. She had to stop me, and tell me in sweet murmurs to take my time. That she was going to be mine. That all I needed was to be with her.

Theresa was beautiful and she taught me love. Not sex. Just love. Words and caresses in the dark, in the backroom of my father’s store, on Carey street.

Convent. She would come from school. She would buy something , still wearing her green and white St. Theresa's Convent School uniform. And then I would walk to her and talk to her and touch her hand. And she would smile. From those beautiful smiles, I learned that she wanted to see me.

Every day I would rush from school, running through the swampy roads, jumping over trash cans and chicken bones and be there. Sometimes I would miss her. My only comfort was that she probably came in, hoping to see me there, waiting for me to serve her an ice cream cone or a candy bar or a coke.

Theresa had the most beautiful neck. The most beautiful smile. But her skin was the most beautiful thing about her. I could not share my life with her with people who would not understand our relationship. It was so pure. There was something magical about being so deeply in love with someone without knowing what to call it. It took me years to learn that it was love. Infatuation. Puppy love.

It was something for the heart, to stay with me.

And then that day Jim asked me if I had ever kissed her and I said “No. Why?”

“Like in the movies,” he said. “Guys always kiss the girl and then there is a cut. And then we see them dressed differently. There’s a secret moment that the movies don’t tell us. But we know.”

A secret moment with Theresa? Yes, I could kiss her, maybe. Yes, hold her hand. Maybe squeeze her. But then what should happen after the lights go off? I could not imagine that.

I cannot write about Theresa. After twenty-five years of wandering around the world, I ran into her and she asked me what I was doing. She took my name and phone number and in the middle of the night, she called me. She told me that she had entered my name into google search and had found stories I had written.

I told her that I had always wanted to write a story about us. She asked me why I didn’t, and I told her I could not find the words. Then she asked me if I realized that she walked every day from school by the beach, all the way to Carey Street, in the hot sun just to buy an ice cream cone from our store and see me.

I told her that I was always waiting for her, to see her. I told her that I always liked to look at her, her lips when she ordered the ice cream, that now, after decades, I remembered exactly how she smelled.

Theresa told me that she had been married and divorced. Can’t write about her. Certain things can’t be told.

Then there was Miriam. She was the girl who taught me how to kiss. Wildly. Without words, we kissed and mated. It was my first time ever, with a woman, in Clay Ashland.

A school ball. Everyone wanted to dance with her. We danced.

She said she was tired and I followed her outside. She said she had to go home. I decided to walk her. She took off her shoes. It was not so dark so she walked barefoot, skipping the edgy rocks that littered the road from W. D. Coleman High to her house, an old wooden castle on the banks of the St. Paul River.

We reached the Methodist Church, across from the infirmary where Big Nurse Jane snored. We sat on Big Nurse Jane’s front porch. I put my arm around her. She put her head on my shoulder. I kissed her. And life changed. Life took on a different coloration and I discovered that there was something special about women.

Miriam liked wild things. It ended with the school year. What happened to her during the war? I don’t know . . .

We experimented, doing everything we found in a yellowish copy of the Kama Sutra that a decadent teacher hid amongst the stack of books in the teachers’ library. We all knew where it was and we all read it. In gym class, we shared notes on who tried what.

Miriam outgrew me. Overnight, before I knew what was going on, she was hanging around with big tall guys with mustaches. She never told me why. We just stopped being together. I am ever grateful for the sweet moments we shared.

But I can’t write about her. She's somewhere maybe with children and husband. And who knows, she might have said something about me to her family and friends. But I learned from her what pleasure one gets from a woman. I learned that kicking soccer ball or jumping in the river with my friends were not the best things in life. She awoke in me the animal instinct that Theresa left dormant. As I grew through months and years, I wondered what it would be like to meet someone who was the combination of the two of them.

My first bout with heartbreak came with Judy Anne. We teased each other for years. Then we got together. Then she left me.

My heart was so broken, I decided that I would never ever fall for another woman! But first, I wanted to go on a revenge rampage. Then I became timid around women, and then I went back to my books and tried to read about love. But I could never relate, because all the love stories in books were so out of my world.

Juliet and Romeo. Would I ever meet someone that I would love so much that I would want to die with her? Kill myself because she could not be with me? No way. I would miss my friends, basketball, football, and potato greens. I couldn’t leave my parents and my sister and my brother.

After Judy Anne, after crying for her secretly, I swore that I would never let any girl break my heart. That meant also that I was not going to give my heart to no other girl. Not until I ran into Laura. The eyes of Laura captured something in me. I floated around her and she went along.

One day, she asked me what I would do if she broke up with me. I told her that I had thought about it. A big fight followed. She said I never really loved her if I thought about breaking up with her from the beginning.

I was being honest. Stupid me. She later taught me that love is not about honesty, but trust. There’s a difference. We only had to trust each other and the rest of everything would follow.

Laura showed me that love was not simply something of words: it was a set of actions. She said she could do things for me that no other human being would ever do. Slowly and surely, I got to the point where I would have jumped from Ducor Palace Hotel had she asked me to. But she never asked.

I learned to trust her body. I learned to touch her, for her pleasure and not for just my pleasure. But her pleasure was what made me happy. She took me into her world.

She had a sweet sadness about her that kept me wondering what to do to make her happy. The more I tried to make her happy, the less I thought about anything else. And then one day, she told me that she loved me more than I could ever love her. I did believe her. And then, we decided to dare each other.

Without speaking the words, we dared each other, to see who would survive a break up.

I did not cry. I didn’t feel like jumping into the ocean or from the top of Ducor Palace Hotel. She was gone. I had loved her. I had learned to give my love to someone without expecting too much in return. Maybe it was just a way of learning to protect myself. My heart was not broken, but I missed her. Every bone in my body missed her, every inch of my skin . . .

After the break-up with Laura, I decided that I would go on an adventure. I remembered that beautiful center spread I saw in my sixth grade Social Studies book. I looked for the book and found it, on Broad Street, where all the books of the nation were on sale on the sidewalks after the boys had looted all the bookstores and libraries on April 14, 1979, when Baccus Matthews told them that he knew where to find cheaper rice.

It was a picture of the Grand Canyon at sunset, with Indians, horses and tepees. And the golden cliffs in the horizon with red sunlight blanketing the entire page. I would go to see the Grand Canyon.

An old dream, from my youth, at a time when I thought the sky was the limit because Papa used to tell me that the one thing we should live for is to traverse as many time zones as possible. And Mama used to tell him that he should not fill my head with vagabond ideas. Because Papa was a vagabond of a certain kind.

Papa thought life was to be constant movement. In and out of time zones, with social differences. But I can’t write about Mama and Papa, because the first time I did, it took my sister almost her entire lifetime to forgive me.

Now that my sister and I are at the age when we both can look at life from the top of the hills, there is no need for another family crisis that might take us into our graves. I love her. She tells me she loves me more than anyone else could ever, and I told her that kind of love is dangerous. And she said because of that, because of how much she loves me, I should never write about our family as long as she is alive.

A psychological dilemma. If I have to wait for her to die before I write about us, I will probably never write. I am older than her, and though the idea of her death is sometimes scary, I don’t want to die before her. But I don’t want her to die either. When I tell her I’m busy writing, even political stories, she warns me. So my family is out.

I haven’t made it to the Grand Canyon, so I can’t write about that – not yet.

I have had experiences with life, filled with women stories. How do I write about them? When I change their names, it feels as if I’m writing about different persons, and not the same women I knew. Judy is only Judy if I call her by name. If I write about her under any other name, she becomes someone else stealing Judy’s experience.

The one story that I want to write is my own story. That scares me. I have so many dark secrets deep down that I could never write about, even in a fictionalized story. The first time I tried that, my friends thought I was some kind of weird human being. They couldn’t understand how I could even imagine some of the things I was writing about. I began to censor myself and started to deconstruct my wonderful mind filled with colors and words.

I can’t write about all the women who brought me up, who were so nice to me, even when they broke my heart. Looking back, I realize that a particular woman marked my growth at every stage. Every important moment in my life was linked to a certain woman. Every memorable experience in my life had something to do with a woman.

My friends. The ones I grew up with were just there. They witnessed my life. I told them what I did or what I wanted them to know. I watched them as they watched me. But women were the ones who took me from one stage of my life to another.

Like my Papa and Mama, I am afraid to create a family crisis. But then again, a family without a crisis is like a school of fish trapped in a glass bowl. So, Papa was there to witness my life, while Mama carried me through time. Only when she appreciated what I did , did I feel I could move on to a higher level.

Politics could be a good subject to write about. The real truths. But how? My political friends are just entering their careers and they might not want me to talk about the things we know about each other, at least in our political lives, and especially their blind ambitions. I am an existentialist, but unlike Albert Camus, I believe in something beyond this earthly existence.

I believe in Country, Family and God. But I would not die for a country, because it is too much of a fuzzy notion. A country is something out of the imagination of the petty bourgeois of the 19th century.

A group of people work and pay taxes to support another set of people who run their lives. A country is also mostly a set of colorful imaginary lines traced on paper, as far back as Columbus or even before him, with certain people deciding what belongs to them. In the name of what? That is my notion of a country.

Of course I love my country. My country is where I feel good and where I have friends and family. But would I die to protect it? The dumbest idea is to die for anything. Suffering for something makes sense, but dying for it? No one can ever prove that there is any kind of pleasure after death. So, I enjoy wine, sex and sun. Depriving myself of those things would be the ultimate stupidity. Because once I die, one thing for sure, I would be eaten by worms, or like Gandhi, turned into ashes.

Whatever death means, I can wait for it, for the rest of my life.

Family, yes, one could die protecting family, but then again, as human beings, we should be able to talk our way out of any deadly situation. That is the difference between animals and us. Animals fight and bleed before realizing that they have to survive the bout and go their separate ways. But as human beings, we should be able to talk about anything and walk away without violence. I would consider death, if it were the only alternative to save the lives of my family. But it would have to be a real bad situation. If it ever reached that point, I hope my family members would talk me out of it.

Dying for God is the most stupid thing any human being can ever do. If we believe that God exists and gave us life, why would we try to force God to take it back? God will take back what God gave when the right time comes. Why tempt the Spirit? So dying for God is the most inhuman thing to do. As my friend Alpha Blondy said, “How can we send the children of God to go kill other children of God in the name of God?”

It is not the only stupidity of this life on earth.

Sex, wine, and the sun: these are things to write about. Although, as a Muslim, I am not supposed to like wine. Forbidden, like bacon, the sweetest scent in the morning, mixed with the aroma of Kenyan coffee dripping in the pot while one is making love to wake up with the sun.

Coffee, bacon and sex at sunrise. God would forgive us for that kind of sin.

Islam forbids me to enjoy sex, except when I am married. Wine is forbidden. Bacon from pork, the best kind, is forbidden, because swine is dirty.

I could write about my friend Siaka, the son of our Imam who asked me one day in a restaurant why I was drinking Heineken. Siaka was a bit older and had gone to Egypt to study the Books. I asked him what was a worse sin, adultery or drinking wine? He said adultery, “because drinking wine, is between you and Allah and He might forgive you. But when you commit adultery, you are touching on someone else’s life and God will not forgive you until you have received 100 lashes on your bare bottom if you are single or stoned to death if you were married.”

Like everyone else, I knew that Siaka, who was married, was also having an affair with Binta, wife of the butcher Musa. So I said to him, “you shouldn’t try to make me feel guilty, because if we went by what you just said, we should stone you to death while I could drink myself to death and take up the issue with Allah.”

Siaka never spoke to me again. Whenever we met at the mosque, he would sit far away from me. He did die a terrible death, during our senseless war. He refused to leave Monrovia until July 1990, when the rebels had hit the city. He tried to walk to Mount Barclay. He was stopped at Thank-God-Gate. He admitted being Mandingo. A 12-year old boy killed him, with a rusty knife.

God, Family and Country are at the foundations of civilization and they are filled with guilt and complexes that we spend our lives trying to overcome. Maybe that is why so many writers are lonely, because they can’t stand these social institutions.

God in a mosque or in a church is never a personal affair. Family with a name is never a personal issue. Country with a flag and a national anthem is never a personal matter. They all grind you to the ground and create so much load that you forget the heavy gravity that makes you age every time you move your feet.

Language is what created humanity. And humanity, with language, created notions of God, Country and Family. If you can’t put it into words, you can’t control it.

Writing about these things can push you into a corner, where people throw stones at you. Ask Rushdie. Or the Danish newspaper that caricatured the Prophet and set millions of people on fire.

There are always those who think that God made them to subjugate the rest of humanity, to keep everyone else in line and make sure the bad sheep are put aside. People who shout their love of Country, God and Family can be scary. They are the kind that are ready to die for a cause. And since our natural instinct is to defend ourselves, they would kill as many people as they can before dying. So it is that they have found reasons to kill other human beings.

After the war, former soldiers in Liberia had a new code. When they said, “I was so angry I could kill myself”, they meant that they would kill you first and then kill themselves.

Death, despair and the lack of sun, sex and wine are all intertwined in this world. It is only my view, in my attempt to come up with a story. To fill a gap and see if I could put words on the line to make sense out of life, like poets and prophets have tried to do all through the ages.

One day I will see the Grand Canyon. And one day soon, I will write about all the women who taught me life. From Mama to the one who mothered children that I call mine. Maybe someday, I will write about politics and sex, and my many discoveries around the world.

Maybe, one day, I will write about September 11, 2001, at 9:00 AM, when I was watching Diane Sawyer interview a young American woman, who was talking about a book she had written about her experience in Latin American. She was telling Diane Sawyer and the audience that when you are a young woman, traveling in some countries, you have to learn to protect yourself, by paying close attention to your environment.

She was in the middle of a sentence when Diane Sawyer interrupted her and said something was happening downtown. Then the camera veered to the window. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. I sat on the bed, holding a shirt I was folding to put in a valise. I was moving into my new apartment that morning.

I sat there and looked at the TV screen. Diane Sawyer and Sam Gibson had forgotten all about the young lady and her book on safety in Third World countries. Diane Sawyer and Sam Gibson tried to find out what was happening.

I picked the phone and called Emira at work. I asked the operator to put her on the phone. Then, while I was telling the young lady to get to a TV set, I heard myself say the ‘s’ word, and I dropped the phone.

Another jet, not a camera crew from a television station, flew behind the tower on fire and hit the other one.

Maybe I would write about that experience that marked me so profoundly, I have never been able to write anything about it. But I remember every minute of what happened, like few other moments in my life.

Maybe one day, the words will come to write about Mama and Papa without me worrying about offending my sister. It is not that I would write anything bad about them, but my sister is secretive like that. She likes to keep family issues behind closed door. And I am not sure I can wait until she grows out of it - being the way she is.

Maybe someday soon, I will not care what my sister thinks, and I will write about Mama and Papa. When I do that, I would have certainly reached the summit of my existence. And I would then be free of it all.

Until then, I will keep looking for ways to put words on the line to make sense of my twenty-first century angst.