LOSS

I grew up in too many neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood, a precursor to a different time. My earliest memories are fragments of my sister’s declarations: hand-stitched streets, liberal roads; sheep, dogs, bleating, barking together. Then,

nothing.

At three, we move again. Ruddy flats, windows squatting so low, they sweep the floors. Shrubs by the twist of roads, curbs and sidewalks; street-signs and barbershops. No livestock, save for the chickens who almost always never cross to the other side alive.

I remember a fence. We roll our skirts and pretend to be models, cat walking that narrow, near-invisible column, in defiance of ink-stained clouds. The sound of my father’s voice echoes like the wind, calling for me, but I am too lazy to unpeg my laundry.

In Okomoko, the sound of taxis and pickup trucks at 4 am remind me: I am thirteen. I cannot stay in bed, nor wait for mother to make breakfast. Mother has not come home in a long time.

I visit her sometimes, the outskirts. Here, bus stops and crescents do not mingle. Roads disregard each other, each one disappears into itself. I‘m tired of walking the distance, of travelling to the cinema, of tussles with morning traffic, of leaving home before the sun crouches in prayer. Why must everything be on the other side of town?

(How I long for the quiet. I hear bleating in my sleep sometimes.)

My life is a mural of half-lived neighbourhoods. The graffiti, sprawling across ugly brick-storeys is still the fondest part of my childhood. I am stuck between not leaving and wanting to escape.

I am twenty-five now. Month after month, I search for a home where the traffic treads like the ocean’s coast. I have not learned to drive. I am scared of road signs and sterile walls. I am neither millennial nor a child of the new generation.

(How far away I am from the shore.)