Impacting Positively

"I've never seen you wearing neck pieces." I get that a lot from people who are caring enough to notice my everyday fashion. Sometimes, I get, "Why don't you wear earrings?" of course I wear earrings, just not everyday. Winifred is not a regular girl child. She can have her hair in 7 different hairstyles in one week but she doesn't apply the same variety to her use of jewelry, when she uses any at all. She uses tiny children earrings because, they're more beautiful than the bigger ones, to her. She never learned to wear neck jewelry because LIFE WAS ALREADY DOING ENOUGH IN TRYING TO KILL HER. Occasionally, she got gold necklaces and foreign chokers as gifts but they always remained better suited for her wardrobe. She would look at them on most mornings and smile, she was a proud owner of fantastic neck pieces. She could never wear them, LIFE WAS ALREADY CHOKING HER.

They came for my friend yesterday. Torches and knives in their hands, dragging him away. The rest of us didn't know where they were taking him to, but we knew we would never see him again. He kicked and fought with all of his strength, he didn't want to go. This was modern day slavery, or worse, genocide. We do not know these people, and why they have brought us here but we know that they do not love us. It all began one morning, when we were betrayed by our father and brought here. I call him father because, he is the one I had always known as our protector. He would feed us, shelter us, and when one of us was sick, he would take us to the doctor. The morning it began, we were all eating peacefully when father came with canes and flogged us out into the open. Then a stern looking man came down from a vehicle, looked us in the eyes and gave an affirming nod to father. He gave him some cash and we were tied, beaten and forced into a lorry with the stern looking man drivin...

Yes, are you thinking of the exact same thing? Yes? No? For most people, the toilet is the most conducive place to make 60% of the day's decisions but for me, it is the bathroom. Actually, not 60% of my decisions are made in the bathroom but one insignificant yet significant decision. Everyday, I struggle with a terrible dilemma in my bathroom. The moment I walk in, take my towel off and hang it, I begin to consider my entire existence and my thoughts shift from life to death. Sometimes, I consider if it will be better to hang myself since my towel seems to dance beautifully from its hanging position while I wallow in misery. I ask myself questions like, "will anybody notice I didn't show up for work, if they don't see me at the office today?" and "will anyone go into panic and wonder if something happened to me, like, did I die?" In between these questions, I think of taking the bold step and ending it all at once but fear pushes me back, like every ...

There is something so sad about the word 'memory'. It depicts all that was and maybe, is no more. I do not know why everytime I hear that word, it dances towards my ears like a sad woman in search of her lost lover on the dance floor. Whenever I think of the word, all that I can remember is his warm embrace and ever happy mood. Sometimes, I get sad and blame myself for his death. They say that sometimes, the only way to show you love someone is to let them go. I felt that I needed to let him go so that he could be with Betty. We were best of buddies but there was a limit to what I could do for him, he really needed his own kind of woman. Till date, I still have not forgiven myself. I remember that very day, when I opened the gates of my house and let my dog Terry run out to the stray dog which the community had named Betty, to have some fun. I watched as he ran to the love of his life and almost as he reached her, he went up in the air. Hit by the sanitation truck, Terr...

There are quite a number of things that you regret doing after you have done them. By this time last year, I prayed for my life to be just as it is right now, it was one of the few new year resolutions that I actually kept. Right now, I do not know what prompted such rash and stupid decisions. Right now, I am out of sanitary materials. Right now, I am glued to my bathroom floor, wondering when this pain will go away. Wondering when, these body fluids will stop their procession from my below, stop mocking me for my terrible and youthful choices. True love was all I ever asked for, and I thought I got it. All the nights I spent with Ade were miserably fun. He would take me to the sweetest spots in town and I would eat desserts and ice-cream to my satisfaction. He really did leave a lot of memories with me before travelling. He left this calamity in my stomach which I am now being forced to expel all alone. He never returned my calls even when I told him that I felt the drugs the physi...