"I spend all of my money on food, that's the reason why I'm always broke," I tell Sam in between bites of my sandwich and re-reading "The Darkest Part of the Forest". Sam doesn't look up from his book and smirks. I suppose that's obvious with the bag full of food that I just bought. 

"I'm broke because I spend most of my time working for someone that doesn't pay me and hardly have time to concentrate on my business which actually does pay me,but I don't have enough resources to actually pursue it which is why I do the unpaying job in the first place...so I can use their resources for free...although it's technically not free..."

I resist the urge to tell him that "unpaying" isn't actually a word and that his statement was badly constructed and incomprehensible, but for some reason I understood it. My mom is always telling me to stop correcting people's grammar, it's off-putting. Ironic though, at the same time she also loves to tell everyone that story of when I was a little girl still learning to speak English and we were living in Ottawa so I was learning French at the same time. Whenever I messed up an English word and she said "what did you say Tana? I'd respond by saying that "It's French mommy". Ironic as well that whenever I do mess up when I'm speaking she's the first one to chide me saying that if English is my first language then at least I have to speak it "properly".

My mind begins to wonder from the book, the food and the new found friend, to everything that I've lost. I've lost what the world says is an essential part of who I am...my native language. Can I really call it my native language when I struggle to speak it? When I was an infant it was all that I spoke, then when I moved to a foreign country where in the process of learning the language of the land  I lost my own. Psychologists say that re-learning a language is harder than learning a new one. Perhaps I just use this as another excuse to defy expectations. Perhaps people are right and I have lost an essential part of myself that I'm struggling to recover; and that's creating a disconnect.

"What do people around you think about what you're pursuing?" I ask him. He was telling me about how he really wants to pursue what he does full-time but his design equipment is too far away and it was way out of his budget to have it brought to Harare. Sam looks up for the first time. He had somehow managed to talk and read the entire time without actually having ot face me. 

"They don't really understand what I do," he admits and closes his book. 

"How does your mom feel about you spending the entire night out?" he asks me with a raised eyebrow.

"She doesn't need to know, I locked my bedroom door and she won't bother me. She'll wake up and go to work in the morning thinking I'm asleep as usual and I have my spare key to the house,"

"And if she ever finds out that you're not in your room?"

"Then I guess I can write you down for all my books in my will,"

Sam laughs then he starts to sing "So you're still thinking of me, just like I know you would,I can not give you everything, you know I wish I could, I'm so high at the moment, I'm so caught up in this..." he is really bad at singing and I can't help but burst out laughing. 

"Hey, I was getting lost in the moment,"

"Young, dumb, broke high school kids, " I sing back discordantly, "While, we're just young, dumb and broke we still got love to give,"

We both burst out laughing. "That's not even the next part of the song," he tells me then farts. Omigod and it's a smelly one. He stops for a second and just sits there with his mouth ajar and I laugh harder and back away. That so did not just happen! I run to the back door of the library. 

"Well, don't just bask in your fragrance, let's get some fresh air," I tell him. He snaps out of his fart-induced shock and looks over at me. "There's no security and it's a beautiful night outside." Sam stands up and follows me. I take out a hair pin and unlock the door. He shakes his head and laughs again. 

"What are you?" he asks me. 

"Zimbabwean ninja aka I'm on YouTube way too much," I tell him. 

"So am I, I'll show you my ninja skills real soon,"

I open the door and the late night breeze hits both of our faces. It's a feeling I haven't felt in a long time or maybe not at all. It's the smell and feel of a new adventure, a new friendship and new possibilities. It's the feeling of not knowing what the hell you're doing and what you're going to do next. It's lost youth and all my dreams piled into one...it's literally me opening the library door and not knowing what we're going to do next; sneak into the elementary school across the road? Sam takes me by the hand and we walk out, almost forgetting to close the door behind us.

"I know where we can go," he reassures me as though we had planned this in the first place. There's a myriad of things I should be considering right now like the fact that I just met this guy, it's the middle of the night and I could be on kidnapped and sold as a sex slave or cut up for organs. But I need to take a risk for once, I've spent too many years under the very protective tutelage of my parents never being allowed to take chances and make real mistakes. Death is in the end inevitable for all of us, at least let me have one wild experience that's not sneaking out of the house to sneak into a library.