My Time With the “African” Monk
My time with him lasted ten months. Only ten.
Yet even now, years later, I find myself thinking about him with a frequency that feels disproportionate to the calendar. Some relationships stretch on for decades and barely leave a mark. Others—brief, quiet, almost incidental—root themselves somewhere permanent. Aiuwetu belongs to the latter. Some would say those ten months felt longer, given the situations and transitions I often found myself navigating during that period of my life. I agree. But I don’t regret a single moment of it.
When I met him, I had already been working the same dead-end airport job for years—ever since I entered the workforce straight out of high school. It was a contract-for-profit corporation that cleaned airplanes. The kind of job that teaches you, very quickly and very bluntly, that dreams of performing in the arts are not just limited but, in certain environments, quietly mocked as foolish. Still, I showed up. I did the work.
That job put me shoulder to shoulder with all sorts of people: immigrants from countries I could barely pronounce at the time, retired veterans killing time before “real” retirement settled in, people just trying to survive. We were contractors—close enough to the airline to wear their colors, far enough away to never belong. The actual airline employees were usually people nearing or exiting their prime: clock in, clock out, no green cards to worry about, no doctor’s notes, no extra steps. Just bright orange and highlighter-yellow safety vests passing one another on the tarmac like ghosts in motion.
One of those people became a close friend. Back then, he was shy. Quiet. We bonded over millennial comforts—trading card games, video games, and Archer, because of its razor-sharp wordplay and absurd humor. Four years into that job, when life nudged me into needing new accommodations, he предложed we live together. His mother was renting out the house they’d lived in for years and relocating out of state. The plan was simple: three tenants, split rent, keep things affordable.
For me, it was a strategy of survival. I wanted to continue my online bachelor’s degree while staying off the radar of credit checks and long-term leases. I planned to leave the airport and work delivery contracts with my father and grandfather. Funny how small the world is—I already knew his family. I’d gone to high school with his older sister, a girl who used to listen patiently to my wacky stories, just as her brother would years later while we cleaned Delta flights together.
The house itself was warm and charming, the kind of place that breathes. It reminded me of my grandmother’s home in Louisiana—something in the walls, something in the quiet. My friend’s mother, who I suspect thought I talked entirely too much, was fair and steady as a landlord. And the third tenant—the one who would quietly change me—was the man everyone called the African Monk.
Aiuwetu.
That’s his name, and even now, saying it feels deliberate, like a small ritual.
He was a Libra, like me, and that’s the first detail that always floats back to the surface. He dressed in clothes that felt handmade, as though they carried intention—likely crafted by artisans who frequented Atlanta’s West End. He carried himself with a gentleness that never slipped into fragility. Conversations with him slowed the air around you. There was warmth there. Calm. The kind that doesn’t demand attention but earns it.
His dreadlocks were gray, like clouds heavy with rain, and his blue eyes held a permanent skepticism when confronted with modern trends. He wasn’t unimpressed—just unconvinced. He came from a simpler time, one he revisited through old television reruns and long, thoughtful conversations. What fascinated me most wasn’t that he seemed wise—it was that he was wise, without performance. A rare thing in men of any age, let alone his.
Even now, I think about how he listened. Truly listened. About how silence never felt awkward in his presence. About how wisdom doesn’t always announce itself loudly—sometimes it just sits across from you at the kitchen table.
I remember shaking his hand before bed some nights and being surprised by how soft his hands were. Not because they shouldn’t have been—just because I never expected it. That softness stuck with me. It still does. It felt symbolic, like proof that a life of contemplation doesn’t harden you—it preserves something essential.
And I think about him now more than I ever expected to. In moments of uncertainty. In moments when the world feels loud and rushed and transactional. Aiuwetu appears in memory not as a lesson, but as a presence—a reminder that wisdom can be quiet, that gentleness can coexist with strength, and that sometimes the most meaningful teachers pass briefly through our lives, leaving behind a stillness we spend years trying to return to.
