In our first life, just after we emerged from the cradle of civilisation and learned to walk, we met every evening on the sidewalk shore of Lake Victoria, on a night just like tonight. The sidewalk was really mud because the shores were really marshes and we approached each other like the white egrets, with expectation and discernment. Wings traversed the skyline like colorful kites and one night the first human songs were found right here, music that mimicked the bird's. This stretch of stone was where the first handholding took place, yours and mine, fingers interlocked like sea anenomes or stars. Color existed more vividly than now, and was much less-named, the night was just as vast. We made paths across mud and bullfrog's lungs, stepping on snail shells and the sleek scales of small fish. The first language was our language, and water was just another word for love. It was all around us. In the morning and in the dusk, coiled in seagrass and stretched along the botfly's blue sides. Like the frogs that wait in water now, our eyes were open. What surprises us, still, is how willingly we accepted the transformation. Some might call it evolution, but we sat on these shores long enough to know. These days were our unveiling, when we walked like egrets and sat like stone. We made cradles from seashells and rocked babies with waves. We named the changing shades of water – we called them tip-toe, sky-streak, rain; North Wind, soft skin, the-first-baby blue. As day traded places with dusk, the insects grew bolder and the birds flew lower. Our hands, though, never changed shape. They merged with mud, with sticks, with stone. They became the first village and love became the first home.

They call them groundnuts here, peanuts still damp from the earth, measured in tiny cupfuls and sold in overflowing handfuls for 200 hundred shillings each. I buy them on the road beside my house while I walk home at night. The woman who sells them to me takes the tray off her head and balances it in one hand while she scoops the nuts with the other. They call them groundnuts here, or g-nuts, for short, but back home we call them peanuts. It wasn't until I lived in Africa that I learned that they come from the ground. It is -10 where you are in the States; it has just become daylight. This week you will give yourself another shot of Testosterone in the thigh. You have just passed month three of your transition. I asked if I could be there when you do them from now on; if I could sit at a computer screen a continent away and watch the hormones that are changing your shape. Sometimes I am scared to tell you that your voice is already deeper. I think this means I am afraid of change. The power has been going off here every night at 7.30, just as it turns dark. I light candles now or hold small flashlights in my hands. I navigate these rooms differently, when I am alone without light. Someday, I think, I will get used to this, cooking over a propane flame flicker, cutting tomatoes in the dark. This time I have not even been in Africa a month. I have not yet tried to count my changes. Now I sit beside groundnuts, and peanuts, and g-nuts. I eat them raw, popped out of the shell. They are soft and chewy, a subtler taste without the salt I am used to. “This must be the hardest thing in the world,” you tell me, “to be so far away when your partner is transitioning.” It is -10 in the Midwest and just turning dark here in Mwanza. I don't think about changes as I slice open shells with my nails. Instead, I think about how if people back home heard the name for peanuts here, they would not recognize it. If I told people about the power going off, and the ants coming back, the water disappearing, and how many locks I have in my house, they might think I'm crazy. There are people I don't tell about you, how our bodies fit together, how your skin makes me alive, how the longer I know you the more I realize how much sense we make. I think about my own transitions, the ones I had to make before I even met you. I think now about the different flavors for love, and all the women who carry baskets full of it that they wove themselves on their heads. I peel open shells and I wave mosquitoes away and I remember how graceful that woman was today, as she balanced that tray and we talked in different languages and we both understood. They call them groundnuts here, or g-nuts for short, still damp from the earth, measured in tiny cupfuls and sold in overflowing handfuls for 200 hundred shillings each. Back home we call them peanuts. I realize that some people don't realize this. Yet I still find it strange: if some people knew what I hold with both hands, they wouldn't understand. To me, all these names taste the same.

Today there is thunder, which means there will be rain. The clouds are heavy and an ashy gray, but I'm staring at a thick white one backlit by sunlight through the office door now. All of the doors and windows here are barred, but I watched a yellow gecko crawl across the outside overhang yesterday nonetheless.   I have started walking home every day, which takes an hour and is a slow, meandering climb from the shores of Lake Victoria, where people grow corn and millet and cassava in the marsh, through the street markets of women selling bananas on their heads and rice muffins over small fires on the ground. Past town, where I turn right onto the road leading to home, is a police station where dogs cool off by curling up in the yellow-orange dust that matches the shade of their fur. When all of the stares and the talking at me becomes too much, I find solace in nature - in purple flowers and bird nests shaped like teardrops, in black kites - a kind of golden eagle I have never seen before - that circle slowly above me. Sometimes I whistle softly as I walk, because it keeps me in my head and feeling centered. I use the Swahili I have learned on the children and women I pass, making sure to smile and look them in the eye. "Habari," I tell the women. "Jambo!" I say to the kids. I have learned that when people say, "Habari," back I answer with, "Nzuri," and when they say, "Salama," the proper response is a slow, "Malahaba." I pass men on bicycles with square kofias atop their heads, and women in colourful cloth with babies tied to their backs. Children in uniforms pass me by, and the big buses used as taxis that honk loudly every few feet. They are called "dala-dalas" here.   Once I leave town, I pass the church, where everyday I hear beautiful singing in Swahili, and the cliff, where people climb up to the sky through red dirt and green shrubs. Once I turn right again I reach the quiet tarmac road hooded by trees that remind me of the Northwest and signal 15 minutes of peace, where I breathe in fresh air and breathe out smiles to the children playing soccer who scream and shout, "Mzungu! Mzungu!" (white person! white person!) every time I pass. Goats pick through garbage on the grass beside the road, and yesterday I saw a baby one jump over a gutter.   Down the tarmac road are winding, bumpy dirt ones, which I follow like a river until I reach the Massai guards of the house next door, who have long earlobes with big holes and wrap themselves in bright red checkered cloth. They don't smile but I know they are kind. Then I open the big gate that opens to the house and inside are my boss' two beautiful kids, who have started stretching with me after dinner and already tell me they don't want me to leave.   It becomes dark here every night at 7.30, and the sky puts on an art show above the corn stalks and coconut trees growing beside the house. Soon after it does, I wrap my bed in a mosquito net and slide inside. Slowly, I feel myself becoming part of this landscape, too.