The only file on my computer with "soul" in its name is a song in mp3 by Joshua Redman called "Soul Dance." And this only because Napster is allowed on campus. None of the thousands of files on my computer, including all those long e-journals I pour my heart out to everyday, have "soul" in their titles. In the not-too-recent past, me and my soul parted ways and only my heart skips a beat every time I see an Ethiopica chick-sista walking on the streets of the not so Ethiopicated town I study in. I haven't been in love for several months, and I miss it. At least then, there was talk of soul and I listened. She was once worth listening to. I gave up on her after what I'm about to tell you happened.

She said, Better to sell my soul to that man's firm who has promised to make me a millionairess in just a few years. Just a few years, think about it, she said. And I'll buy my soul back with all the money I'll make. If I work hard and I really, really sell all of my soul, she continued, then I can even make partner in seven years. Shit, I can even buy land in Lalibela. Do you realize what this means, love? she asked me. That night I parted with her. I hear she has not been happy ever since. Searching for one's soul from the 38th floor of Goldwaser and Fitzgerald amidst Manhattan's dense clouds is apparently a very difficult thing to do. Better to jump out the window, float in the deep white cloud and reunite with your soul, I say sarcastically. After all, for me, there was a different She before her. And there will be one after her.

The She before her was ...

She was the one I wrote that last unnecessary letter to. God, I'm such a bad writer. In the last email I sent you, Dear God, I confessed how I must have made her feel miserable with that short letter I sent her after the last-minute fight I could easily have avoided, but wanted. I mean really, really wanted even when I knew it would make her feel miserable. I wrote to her, asking for her forgiveness even when I knew that she knew she was to blame. I mean, did I have to go that far to show her how miserable she was? Write a letter to her to say she never loved me in the first place, that I knew it, that I knew it from the start? God, I'm such a bad writer. Good writers have good intentions. I had no good intentions writing that letter to her. Now I hear she's given up on "educated" guys and is going out with a local ayer b'ayer negadE, whose dad, they tell me, practically owns the small town where she goes to college in northwestern Ethiopia. After she's done studying, she will be a teacher and she will marry him. And they'll continue to have wet, hot sex until they are old and fragile and their souls dry up.

God, why did you make me such a bad writer? And why do all the e-mails I send you keep bouncing back? Have all your accounts expired? Don't you want to hear how she kisses with passion and smiles when the Qewsin the neighborhood shouts at her: "Yesus yibdash." She smiles and says, "Amen." Now, did you design her that way on purpose? Or did she go out of control at some point and you haven't done anything about it since your cable connection broke down? I want to hear from you at some point. I won't bug you now, Dear God. Just make me stop reading Dostoyevsky.

Before the aspiring teacher who hates herself but loves her cat, I loved this waitress from that small café by the w'yiyitstop in Awarae. It was a brief affair. I'd go all the way to Awarae, go into the small café, order shai, and observe her every movement from a corner. Eventually she got it and one day, right after the café closed its doors for the day, she followed me into the taxi and sat quietly next to me. We talked about simple things, about how it's tiring to work at the café all day long and how she misses her parents in Leku, a small town near Awasa she calls home. She took me to her sister's house, opened the small front door behind which was the entire house.

The first thing I noticed was the small bed. Her sister was back in Leku with their parents. That night, we made love till the dawn dawned on us and she asked me to marry her. But someone didn't think it was a good idea because she got transferred to a branch of the café in Ziway the next week. It must be someone powerful who can so easily snatch away my lovers and put them out of sight so fast. Someone really powerful. Someone with a lot of connections. A huge network that spans from the unflinching loyalty of the CEO of that very famous venture capital firm in Palo Alto, to the owner of 'Mn TayeNaleh, Gebteh MokireN' Tej Bet in uptown Debre Sina, to the head of Daewoo in South Korea. A network that includes the prime minister but really doesn't.

Maybe the prime minister really likes his job. But who's to say? Maybe there's a reason why no one talks about his love life. Maybe we'll have a woman prime minister in 30 years who spent her youth in the late 90s training at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, U.K., and no one will ever know about her love life. Before the waitress who got whisked away to Ziway, I had the honor - I say the honor because I can't find another word for it - yes, I had the honor to serve as the wushimmaof the wife of the Minister for Development.

Now this guy had no love life. He had frustrated his wife and she needed someone badly. She tells me, in bed, while he's talking on TV and impressing his friends at the Sheraton, she tells me that she thought he was all that when she first met him at Stanford. They were then both graduate students and they really believed they could do a lot in Ethiopia. She's been disappointed ever since she saw her husband failing to convince the government to hike import tariffs. Her husband, for all his wisdom, as the honorable "Minister of Development" and a prospective finance minister had one thing he wanted to see the government convinced of …import tariffs were too low for them to start talking about development seriously. He was beginning to forget his wife existed.

She was thirty-eight and wanted to be loved and just be listened to. After we make love, she holds me close to her and cries. She cries quietly. She cries and asks me why did it have to be this way, why was she making me go through this? I say I don't know, I am only twenty-one and I haven't even finished college yet. I try to convince her that it will all be fine because in twenty-four years she'll only be sixty-two and a forty-five year old man may find reason to be close to her, may choose not to abandon her. Maybe I should leave him, she cries, maybe I should go back to the States, work for Goldman in New York. I'm sure Nick would love to have me back in the group.

God, you're so not creative, I whisper. You think worse than I write and you have a Ph.D. from Stanford. You suck, I joke with her. You suck real well. It's true: for someone so well educated, she gives good head and easily comes when I go down on her, "to bite her where it hurts." We met when only the two of us got stuck in the old elevator at the ECA and she jokingly commented that I looked the type who knows how to bite where it hurts. I didn't get it then. I was innocent or something.

Here I am. Time goes by. Listen to me, says the beautiful Hanna. She has a degree in literature from Berkeley and is doing more of the same thing at Princeton now. With beautiful Hanna there are two things you have to be convinced of before she'll even start inquiring about your interests. The first is this: we come from people who suffer in silence, who make love in silence, who eat, pray, and sing in silence. That was her honor's thesis in one sentence. The second is pretty straightforward: she wants you to know that her love is real, that it's precious and not for charity. The first time I slept with Hanna she told me she'll kill me if I didn't marry her. I'm thinking about it. I haven't told her yet about my soul mate, Samrawit, who is in Upstate New York.

Samrawit I'm saving for marriage. To Samrawit I'll finally confess. From Samrawit I'll have a son and call him Bidatam. Because the first thing Samrawit said to me after I asked her out was, "How about zarE mata binibada?"

Which was somewhat crazy, to say the least. It caught me by surprise for a bit but I retorted with my classic charm: "ZarE mata binibada melkam yimesleNal." Hmmm... Samrawit knows how to aybedoo abedad mebdat you. This was four months ago. And it's not like she was drunk or anything. This was sober Samrawit speaking. Not even the Development Minister's wife speaks with such honesty. Not even after a Ph.D. from Stanford.