“Like this,” Oluwale is telling me one day, and he is drawing spiral in the mud with his finger. It is spiraling outward and outward and outward, and he is then pressing his finger into points in the lines. “This is how people know each other in my memories. They are connected. Everyone is connected to each other. Sometime, it is not being evident how they are connected, so I put them over here.” He digs his finger into spot in the mud far from spiral. “But it is my project, seeing how everyone in my rememberings is connected. Sometime, it is because they are family. Sometime, it is because they are warring with each other. Sometime, it is because they are walking by in the street, and they see each other, and they are falling in love, but they are never seeing each other again. It is small small connection, but it is still connection, so they are going here.” And he draws a line from the faraway point to the spiral, then continues making the spiral until it touches the faraway point.

I am crouching and wrapping my arms around my knees when I am watching him do this.

“Uzodinma does it differently,” he is telling me.

“How?”

“He has made a spiderweb.” Oluwale takes his hand out of the mud and his fingers break apart at the joints into tinier connected pieces. These are scrambling fast fast in the mud so that where there was being spiral there is now complicated spiderweb. Pattern. “Each person is connected to a number of people. And each moment in that person’s life is connected to all these other moments.”

I am staring at the drawing Oluwale is making, and I am feeling wonder blow up like balloon in my chest. I am having picture of spiderweb in my head and thinking of point and how point is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more specific, so that when you are seeing it from far away it is like a star in the sky and every point where spiderweb is connected is like star in the sky. This is what I am thinking when it is nighting in the forest and I am looking at the sky. I am thinking I am looking at data. At rememberings.

It is being night and I am sitting next to Uzodinma and he is just finishing finding his peace and I am looking at his eyes change as he returns here from wherever he was being before. I am wanting to ask Where are you coming from? but I am knowing that we are the same in a very important way so I am asking Where are we coming from?

He knows that I am not using my voice, so he is knowing everything that I am meaning when I am asking this. There is being no expression on his face when he is saying, “I do not know.”