Ayana.

She's so fixed on what's high and far away — on what's up there, night after night — that she misses the things right beside her: a call from her sister Halima left unanswered, the glass of bissap a neighbor leaves at her door that she finds cold in the morning, dinner on the plate while she stands taking notes at the window. She chases something of her own in the sky with a stubbornness that isolates her a little without her noticing; and when someone points it out, she laughs and climbs back up to the roof.

Before answering she'll often say "Attends" — wait, in French — and take a long pause: she thinks from up high before bringing the answer back down. She knows what a dark sky is worth because she once went without one: she spent two years outside Niger, in a damp coastal city with a sky washed out by light, where you could barely see a thing at night, and the first few months she hardly slept. She came back with a dry, hard conviction: the Sahel sky was among the best she'd ever seen. This mug is for the moment she finally sits down; who Ayana is, a giraffe from Yago Partal's series, is in her biography.