It’s still summer, in my mind. Maybe not technically, but nothing’s technical, in my mind. It’s all syrup in there. Minds are like that. My mind is like that. It’s well into September, but it’s summer because there are still mosquitoes. I’m noticing bites every now and then, here and there—my ankles and the insides of my elbows.

They feel like intimate places to me, suddenly, because mosquitoes bite them. Soft underbellies, cotton candy skin like the joining of the hip or the eyelid or those smaller, lowest ribs, bent deep into the abdomen, sweet marrow.

Do I taste sweet?

Less now, I must. I hope. I’ve been trying so hard. It’s so hard. I’ve been trying. I’m trying.

Refugees in Malawi want to come to America. That’s what they say. That’s what everyone says. Everyone wants to come to America. Everyone says that everyone wants to come to America. Priyanshi tells me that we have great marketing. She’s right. She’s a little bitter when she says it. She isn’t being sweet. “I know everyone in my building back in Surat,” she tells me. “Everyone knows me. We all know each other. It just happens. You can’t come in or out without running into someone.”

“It’s like that here, too–in some places, I mean.” Not in our building, I mean, or the last building we lived in, but in other places here. We’ve lived in two triple-deckers, back to back, we’ve never run into any of our neighbors coming in or out, but before that we were living in a house with four other people and several times a day we–

“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Everything here is ice cream.”

There are roughly fifty-two thousand people living in Dzaleka. They are living there, not existing there. They have lives there. Everyone is waiting to go somewhere else, to go to America, where everything is ice cream. Everyone says that they are waiting, but they’ve been doing an awful lot of living while they wait. They have houses and concerts and college courses and cultural festivals and market stalls and artist studios and dance competitions. They can’t help themselves. People shed these things around themselves right alongside all the dead skin, community, and hair, just pile up after a while if you stay in the same place long enough, and they keep piling up and piling up until someone with a machine gun and a machete comes to sweep it all away. There are half a dozen different dance groups, all of them bitter rivals. They each refuse to take part in my school’s book project if any of the other groups are included, or if the other groups are included, their part has to be bigger than those and they have to get paid more for it. They’ve won competitions, you know.

Cherish is a photographer, like some people. She has a mother, like most people. She smiles, like no people at all in the entire world, except for her. She’s smiling in the first picture I see of her, on the Google Drive, her artist photo. Priyanshi asks me about her. “Her mother has been in Dzaleka for twenty-four years. Cherish is nineteen.”

“She’s never been outside the camp?”

“She’s been outside the camp. Everyone’s been outside the camp, on a trip with a permit, or while their bodies were sleeping. She’s never lived outside the camp.”

“Is she Malawi?” Priyanshi says “Malawi” like I say “Marwati”, which is wrong.

“Malawi says she isn’t. She wants to come to America. She wants to be American.”

“Everyone who isn’t here wants to be American. You guys have great marketing.”

“And we get you hooked.”

She tells me that I’m setting myself up for failure, going completely cold turkey. But she also tells me that even a little sugar is just setting myself back to square one, so I don’t know. “When your blood sugar spikes, the cravings don’t stop for another two weeks afterwards. You should know this stuff. You should be researching.”

She asks me to pick up ice cream from the grocery store. She frowns in the mirror and curls up under the blankets, dead quiet, in the middle of the day. When I dig her out, she tells me how much she hates the way this place has changed her. She hates that she can see it.

“It would be okay, or I mean it would be better if it was just me feeling it. It’s easier to do things about feelings, and no one else ever stares at your feelings.”

“No one is staring at your body,” I lie.

“It feels like they’re staring.”

It’s only people she doesn’t know whom she can feel staring. She doesn’t know anybody here. She’s been trying. We’ve been trying. We keep meeting people and spending time with them, talking to them and listening to them, learning about them and telling them all about ourselves, we could make Jeopardy categories of each other and win big, but we don’t seem to know anybody yet. “My professor was telling me about this photo during the last meeting. I can’t remember the names, but other bits, I can remember her saying this one here is ‘Leo’, that’s the only name I can remember, and he’s a guitarist.”

“He’s holding a guitar.”

“Yeah, that’s how I know, but this guy here, next to him, he’s a singer– you can’t tell that by looking.”

“What else?”

“His neighbors want to kill him. It never stops for some people, not even in the camp. He’s a Hutu, and they’re Tutsi. Or I think he’s a Tutsi and they’re Hutu.”

“Hell of a thing to get mixed up, isn’t that?” says Priyanshi, and I try not to understand what she’s saying.

“They shout at each other in the street. They start fights on the porch.”

Everyone has all their teeth in the photo, mostly. Everyone is standing together, nearly two-dozen of them– a whole ensemble. Everyone is smiling. There are dentists in the camps, not a lot of equipment, but plenty of advice that everyone follows, and no sugar, or not that much. Everyone’s teeth are nice and white, mostly. It’s not like how people always think.

I read a poem by one of the artists about urges and cravings, starving for someone’s love, and I’m not sure he knows what he’s talking about, not really.

“He’s literally starved. It says that in his bio.”

“Starving isn’t the same thing as withdrawal. I’m not saying withdrawal is worse. It’s just not the same thing, that’s all I’m saying.”

“It’s just sugar, Matt.”

“You have no idea what it is.”

“I know it’s hard.”

“You have no idea what it is.”

Priyanshi always eats the brownie bits out of the chocolate-brownie ice cream before handing me the spoon. She gets mad if I eat any of the brownie bits before her, and then she says that she isn’t really mad, can’t I tell when she’s just playing?—but she’s mad, now, that I can’t tell when she’s just playing. I don’t know her. She doesn’t know anyone.

There are suicides in the camp. There are murders in the camp. There’s shouting in the streets and fights on the porches. Everyone claps at the festivals. People come from outside of the camps to watch the festivals and concerts, people come from the rest of Malawi into the camp, and they see how things are there and then they go right back to how things are everywhere else, and everyone wants to come to America, but aren’t they already there? Aside from the sugar. And the fights on the porches. “Everyone in this country is so mad at each other all the time, but no one is even bothering to shout about it,” says Priyanshi. “Nobody even wants to shout at each other. Everyone just looks at their shoes. Everything here is ice cream.”

“I saw a man shouting racial slurs at some teenagers on a subway-car once,” I tell her, and I tell her that it’s actually the only time I can think of that I’ve ever seen strangers say anything to each other on a subway car aside from asking if this seat is taken or which stop is this or saying sorry about bumping into you there.

Nobody calls themselves a refugee, not even Cherish, who has never had a nationality. She refers to herself as a refugee because that’s the only velcro she can stick to in other people’s heads, but she doesn’t call herself one. She doesn’t call herself by her own name, and she doesn’t call herself a human being either in that inspiring-NGO-promo-video kind of way. We Are All Humans is the name that my professor wants to give to the book we’re compiling of these artists and their work, and I worry that that sounds maybe a little UNICEF-y, doesn’t it? I ask her what the artists would like to call this project, and she admits that in the eight or so months she’s been working on this with them, she hasn’t thought to ask. She’ll set up a Zoom meeting for that next week and see what they think. Cherish wants to call herself an American; she’s coming to America for college, she’s managed to scrape together some funding.

“It’s strange that she has to pay at all. Why do any refugees have to pay for college?”

“What do you mean?” I ask. I think maybe I know what she means, actually, but I’m not sure.

“What bad thing would happen if all the refugees just went to college in the United States and no one paid for it? Like if they just went to classes and listened to the lectures and worked on the projects and turned in the homework, and took the tests? Would the schools go broke? Would the professors become homeless? Would the administrators starve?”

“They’d go into withdrawal.”

Here’s the difference between human beings and people: human beings have the right to exist, but people have the right to live. There’s no such thing as human life; there are only the lives of people. I’m not even sure what it means, but I’m sure that it’s true. Cherish doesn’t call herself a human being; she calls herself a person, that’s how she has it written in her bio, under all her photographs. Her photographs are pretty good. Not terrible, certainly. She’s only been doing it for a few years. My professor talks about them as objects of personal religious worship, “absolutely sublime work, it’s really incredible, I’ve never seen anything like it,” because that’s the only velcro her head can stick to, photographs by refugees.

When Cherish lands at Reagan International, there’s a whole welcoming party waiting for her carrying signs like “Hope Can Happen” and “Dreams Come True” and “Keep Believing”, dozens of people cheering and smiling and hugging her and taking pictures together because she’s an amazing human being, she’s so strong, she’s made it through so much. After two months on campus, she cries every third night curled up under the blanket because she has four roommates and she doesn’t know them or anyone, and she has a mirror. Her teeth are starting to rot, and her belly is starting to bulge. She’s an American, not a person, and everything is ice cream, here, it’s sweet– and it’s cold.