MYTH, WATER, ACHE

On Losing a Parent and Wanting More Than What I Was Given

Mainly I love the rain, but that day it was closer to an enemy. I took every bad thing as personal, as if the earth had conspired against me and a tide was pulling me under.

And I know that we are all specks of dust in a grand universe of atoms, that I am the one holding the mirror to the sky, weeping in the rain. Tragic. Cliché. No pity, please, but let me cry. I was miserable, and searching for light, for some source of light.

Then aja.

The Barbican Conservatory.

The rain beating against the glass. I wanted to be invisible. So I did not look for a seat, and sat instead on the wall of the first aisle I saw, pretending the branch, the touching of leaves, was a silent act. I was self-conscious and afraid. Teary, with thoughts of my father, and what was handed to my mother when she came to collect his things: the brown leather watch, a letter in his backpack, his last words. His funeral rites. How long had he been carrying those words, certain of the cancer’s fatality. Knowing.

And there’s a hole I cannot fill, an ache I can’t give shape to. There’s the movement of the wave, and then there’s the running from what is.

And I don’t want to reveal anything of the chaos or the weight, but it’s like everything around me is breaking. The body should be neutral, yet grief has a negative charge. I’m sorry, and want to bury my head in the soil and ask Athena for wisdom, but even she harmed Medusa. Oya is violent wind and storm. Yemoja is Mother, Yoruba goddess of the rivers and oceans, but what use are myths, my emblems, my dreams of horses, when the world is wicked, the Niger Delta is poisoned, and my birth-land, all land, is fractured. What use is any of this when the rain refuses to stop and my father is gone. What use was the struggle for nationality when two days before his death, at our doorstep, finally, the British passport. I don’t want to think but I don’t know how not to.

That day, the tears spawn from the Niger Delta. My heart aches at unfortune moments. All the way through the poetry, aja monet’s voice, the sunlight in her throat, I leak a river, wanting to be like her, to walk through life like her, with devotion, with a clarity of self shaped with graceful hands.

And what I mean is she did not just arrive, but worked and toiled to be the woman we see. I mean maybe this is the other side of the hurting. The glimmering. The presence of a bright light and life. A room full of diamonds, monstera, gladioli, and speckled heart-shaped leaves running wild across a glasshouse. Somewhere water is flowing with ease as the sky wails above us.

And what I mean is humility. A wholehearted loving of the world and all its people. A willingness to witness the brutality of what we turn our eyes from, and still it sits in the bones (it must). I mean to show up, to gather breath, to commit to the organising of breath for the movement of the wave.

And in this moment, I return to the words of Maysoon Abu Dweih EI-Kurd, mother of Mohammed El-Kurd’s, who said that “the wind will certainly blow in the direction my ships covet”. Breath will gather, gathers, as the past, present, and future collide. All my people billowing as wind, gathering all the air in our lungs to topple every weapon formed against us.

I mean why are your dreams built on bloodlust. I mean why must I be down for you be to up. I mean I’ll take your wilful ignorance and give you a goblet of honey that forever overflows, because love and kindness know no measure in their expansion. They will ripple outwards.

And I have to believe this. I have to believe it in order not to disappear or die. Despite the darkness, and my eyes fortified against ghosts, I can still hear the music of my ancestors. I can still feel the presence, the strength of my father, and what I want is not to overcome or to triumph over this loss, but to feel safe enough to grieve. To allow myself, for a moment, maybe, to collapse and not try to control the after. What remains is neurosis, but still everything has a chip somewhere.

I want more than what I was given, more than I’m “allowed” to have. I want to feel worthy as me, and to write in a quiet room, a place of my own. I want to teach, to dedicate my life to the colouring of flowers, to the tending of the earth, young minds, and the writing. The writing will always be my reprieve, but God I am tired and I have to believe in something. I have to believe

that my father did not die because this world is cruel but died because. No. Just that meaning is unknowable And in the meantime, here is a rose garden. Every loss is inconceivable and we are all deserving of gentleness.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx