I look for you when the world is quiet,
When you aren’t waiting for their likes,
retweets, comments, reposts…
I look for you when the world is loud,
When their judgment condemns you,
When you want to travel to the end of the world and stay there.
I look for you because I find you in extremes,
So when you stop to catch your breath,
I hope then you will choose me,
You’ll love me not by their ratings or your desire to meet their expectations.
I await your embrace.
Give yourself time
Time to unravel
To choose yourself above all else,
To love and lose,
To sink or swim,
To pick and choose.
Give yourself time,
Time to marvel,
At all the things you’ve done,
At all the things you’ve planned.
Give yourself time,
For you have this life,
Shouldn’t it be worth it?
I hope this finds you
utterly bothered, restless,
unsettled,
anxious…I hope it sets your veins ablaze,
So your dear heart may restart.
Or maybe it burns the ice that preserves your heart.
Dear Sir,
I hope you…
Forget it!
I just wish you’d live on your terms,
Not the world’s.
Sincerely,
True.
Dear Stardust,
How are you?
How does the sun look like where you are?
Is she bright yellow up above you, or tangy orange as she travels home? How does she look like?
And you?
How do you feel right now?
I spend my days writing these letters to you, talking to you the best way I can, using what I have.
Sometimes, I feel like I could pour my heart on paper more than on a device.
The internet never forgets.
I want you to behold my handwriting, to see how I slant my consonants, hide my vowels…
Stardust, I guess I just have better conversations with you when there is a pen and paper between us.
We think we are the sun and the moon,
Stardust, we are anything but that.
The sun shines in her time, gives way for the moon and in turn the two have never failed the galaxy.
One too hot, the other too bright
One we branded yellow, the other white, yet they give each other time to reign, the moon goes to sleep when the sun rises, sometimes she lingers in the background…slowly drifting away.
Stardust, we think we are the sun and the moon, but it feels like I have been waiting for my time to shine longer than you have.
Why is it that my soul clings to you even when you are miles away?
Why is it that you seek me when I am out of reach? Is this love? Is this companionship or is this madness?
I don’t know anymore Stardust, what I do know is that I won’t stop waiting.
Never count sand in the morning,
You’ll never get past the first grain you behold,
And in so doing, the sun will go to sleep and so will the sun within you.
Never count the lashes they give you,
Your scars will always remind you of how many times they broke you.
Never hold onto the bile in your heart,
It may spread into your soul and once that goes dark,
death looms and there is nothing as worse as the death of the soul while the body still lives.
Never let those who choose to see you kneel before them break your spirit,
Rise up even if it’s one toe at time,
Rise up Child,
For your spirit is from those of old, eons of prosperity and pain, and you only heard of what the phoenix could do, but have you ever asked yourself what the Sun’s been doing every day?
You are it, Child, so fight for it, forgive to heal and rebuild, fight…
Hope.
I once heard the moon say,
Every time a soul is wronged, Heaven weeps,
Her words crawled the length of my spine,
I asked, “How can we tell that heaven is weeping?”
The moon smiled at me, and when I looked back at her,
She said, “Look outside Child, don’t you see heaven weeping?”
My Love is like a series,
He intrigues at first glance, draws you in and keeps you guessing.
My Love is like a series,
As you watch him, so does the world,
Sometimes he is true, sometimes he is but what you desire him to be,
But rarely is he what he wishes to be for fear of losing an audience.
My Love is like a series,
He has a following as much as those who hate on him.
My Love is like a series,
As you begin season one, someone has had five seasons of him, and some are enjoying re-runs.
My Love is like a series,
He is what you perceive him to be depending on the time, day, place and mood you’re in.
Sometimes with a glass of wine, he’s mellow.
Sometimes with popcorn, he keeps you so glued that you forget your friends’ warnings.
Sometimes as you do the dishes, you yell ‘liar! he ain’t good for you,’ because you know the script so well and those spoilers online already told you he’s cheating.
My Love is like a series,
Just like any other production, you can choose to forget about him, to walk away, love yourself and in so doing- find that you were the Producer all along.
Find me in the silence, he says.
Find me in the place where the noise from the world comes to a hush, or a whisper, where it feels like the only truth you’d find is the one that is.
“What if I don’t want to find you?” I ask and he smiles.
“I knew you would ask that, you question everything Dee, and it is great if only you would stop to listen to answers you receive. Find me Dee.”
I shake my head and continue writing the dialogue I was working on. It’s the next book I hope to publish and everything about the lead character evades me. He knows I’m in my world and so he walks away.
I know how many steps he takes to the door before he stops because I count when he’s not listening. How odd it is that he asks of me what he knows I would not provide.
Apples.
I suddenly want to eat three apples- something red and crunchy and healthy…and what’s in my house is an endless supply of tea bags, sugar, water and two oranges.
He calls me, “Dee…” and I look up at him and he says “stay safe!” I nod and smile and tell him “you too.” What hurts is knowing he will drown himself in another bottle of whisky thinking he can have and destroy what he has at will.
In the kingdom of Kale, long before the gods came to dwell among men, and the waters of the beautiful lake graced every home, there were those who knew what an abomination was. These were the men and women who could look into your eyes and behold the lives of your great grandchildren. No one was allowed to visit these men and women. If your farm was dying and your children wandering even then you could not visit them. They only answered the call of the gods and it is because of one of these gods that I am here today.
Her name, Lando, meaning the fair skinned one. She was the sun and the moon, an ever present beauty at dawn and dusk. Those who beheld her say that she had the eyes that could sink nations, drown fishermen and uproot trees. My people are known to pepper their words. No one has ever held up a picture to my face to prove these things and until then I will agree that she was simply a woman and to any man, a woman is a thing of beauty if he’s not lain beside her.
Lando was the first god to arrive in the kingdom of Kale. It was the season of the full moon where the fishermen prayed to the gods to help them catch some fish, if not a net full at least a handful so they could feed their families. They loved the sun and feared the moon. When the moon was in her full glory, all the fish would never come to the surface and the deeper they went into the lake, the less certain they were of making it back to the shore.
It was in one of such seasons, at the break of dawn when Lando appeared on the shore. The people say that they heard beautiful singing and when their ears led their legs they found themselves before this beauty whose skin glowed like the sun.
When she finished singing her song, she rose and her feet led the way to the King’s home. No one followed her that morning. Later in the evening, the King summoned the people and they feasted on the delicacies prepared by Lando as she sang into the night. For many harvests and seasons, the kingdom of Kale prospered until one evening when the skies could not help but lash out in anger and after the storm, walked in Dichol.
Whereas Lando was sunshine, Dichol was darkness. She was as dark as the night and those who picked a lump of soil from the earth claimed that even that was nothing compared to the god, Dichol. Dichol too upon arrival made her way to the King’s home and she was welcomed by the Queen. It is often said that the Queen had the heart of the Lake, wicked and wild, in everything she did. The people whisper their assumptions because rumor has it that wicked Queen’s spirit still roams the earth ready to strike down anyone who speaks ill of her. Now, they say that she was jealous of the attention the people of Kale were giving Lando and as such, she cried to the lake to send forth Lando’s rival to the land. The Lake being the mother of all souls, mortal and immortal, heard her cries and sent Dichol.
No one has ever described Dichol as they did with Lando and it pains me that they only referred to her as “dark night.”
Daughter of Dichol is a short story I submitted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize. So, since it didn’t make the cut, I thought why not share it here 🙂
Download a free copy of the story on:
nilichoandika 