I used to hear her sing

Watching her beside another, wasn’t quite pleasant. This vision flashed against my inner bruises. Wounds inflicted by a false sense of belonging and a bubbling entitlement. My racing mind was unable to comprehend the sour scenes unfolding before my weary eyes, at the end of the aisle where she stood. I had never been in such a wrong place before. Yet after so long, of listening to the sadness beating within my chest and the priest’s lengthy sermon, I had to put myself through so much vivid imaginations, this felt so depressing.
A piercing wave through my heart pushed me towards stopping the proceedings but my frozen body wouldn’t let me. I sat on the last pew immersed in thoughts of what I had inside my pockets, sticks of cigarettes wrapped in an old ragged cloth, with stains of bitterness and nicotine from my old bad habits. I was a good bad guy who had fallen victim of the wrath of one wrong turn. The feeling of betrayal caressed me under my shirt, right above my ribs, via my inner thighs, down to my feet. Nothing would heal such a cancer spreading outside my body.
My world stopped, for a second, in a desert, losing grip of its fluids, pouring them out down my face. By sheer luck, a stream of words flew in my old springs too.
“I bought these flowers just for you, ” I’d say, “None of what you planted in my soul has withered.” She would look into my eyes for a moment, smile to her ears, hold my fingers tightly between her palms, “All the time, my love, in this life or what is to come, you will always be in my heart.”
Later on, I’d have Trevor deliver more flowers to her house with a note inside written, “there’s something about stars, those objects in your beautiful heart, leaving traces of you wherever you go”.
“The rhythm and quietness of that poem will sweep her off her feet,” I imagined, “her flight should be arranged as soon as she receives it. ”

Admittedly, a lot had changed over the years. Those words were blurred and made no sense. The symmetry line between us had been tampered with. A part of me was wishing that this was just a dream, but the woke self in me was pondering on the fact that it was time to let her go and face the truth, even if it would mean seeing her happily throw petals to the grave she was pushing me into.
Those gone good days had bled on the depression that outgrew on summer fields. It was a mystery to the ones who passed me by, unable to behold the darkness behind the letters I tailored to suit her smile, for the fine wine that she was. My head would shake often. Trying to imagine how far time pushed me to the black spot where I knew love for self was like a mass of dust blown at the top of a cliff.
With freedom came slavery, with clarity came confusion. I was getting used to the person nobody ever told me I was. That one boy I never knew, out of ignorance and inability to make efforts towards inner self seeking. The silent and calm born of rain and night. Always hiding in the blinds for ease of being misunderstood. Deliberately giving his small circle the benefit of doubt when it came to figuring out what nightmare meant when he said, “I have not been writing.”
I had no right to even appreciate that my continuous loyalty to solitude and trials of walking away from myself would one day lead me to the edge of living and offer me my last breath as a prize for bowing down before doom and kissing her feet. The brighter side of it, at least I wanted to believe, could keep me awake in an unending sleep, lying above a saline sea, keeping my head six feet up, for one two more seconds.
My childhood was brightened by flickering waxed candles beneath chandeliers, on Saturdays when a dozen of women would gather for prayers in my shabby home. The mood of those days crept into me like a damp into timber. Giving me a break from the long week haunted by the chaos that resided inside our door. Happiness, for a long time had seemed as a faraway prospect as the moon. However, this found temporal healing on such an evening. My best part of it all came at the end of the fellowship, right after the bread was broken. My sister’s beautiful voice would glow up the room as I played with her toes like a piano.
The touch of my fingers performed the magic required to make Rosa sing soothingly. Her hitting the low and high notes was angelic. Swells of power rose up in her throat. I couldn’t even tell if it was words that came from her. It was music, sweet music and grace, and the haunting feeling of knowing that it was brought out in a fit of rage, of pain. Sending healing and a steady spell across the evening. It was a promise of tomorrow.
I never knew that was just but the beginning of our story, happy or sad, it would still be a story worth being put into words and passed down onto sons and daughters returning home to forgiveness and a father’s warm embrace.
Her hair was lighter back then, chestnut I suppose, and she would let Nina, our cousin, braid it for hours in front of the mirror as soon as the guests left. No one knew when the rain would, out of nowhere, start beating us. It became rapidly plain that if we were ever to find peace, our meticulous grasp of what held our sanity in place had to be loosened. We allowed it to slip, without perceived contempt, out of our begging hands. How would we be if grass was greener on our side. Would we be bold enough to reap all we had sown in the thorny fields? A broken heart, we quickly learned, was nothing to be ashamed of. We always wore it up our sleeves.
Now years after chains of failed suicide attempts, I would lean on my table, in a foreign land, my cheeks resting in my palms, contemplating on what Trevor once told me, “When you open the window to strangers, you are shutting your eyes to those behind you.” I missed almost everything in those words, alongside my zeal for a better life with Grace. Life had taken me through its sharp teeth, rolled me beneath her tongue, thrown me up and down her corrosive mouth, turning me inside-out, squeezing the poetry juice out of my veins, perhaps an impromptu encounter with my muse, then pushing me down through a free fall. There I was, gliding on my way down, clutching at a thin straw, a tender hope that maybe one unprecedented day, all would be smooth and I’d trace my way out of her bosom painted beside the allure of darkness. With close to nothing but a song and a hunter’s prayer.
Mama’s words came to me where I sat at the back of the church, “Your path will always be slippery if you try finding it on their wet hands”. They hit me to the core. I was no longer trying to balance the uncertainties that truth had plagued me with. It was certain that I had slipped into a pool of melancholy as I witnessed Grace say yes to Trevor, my best friend.