Your knuckles are kicking

You are still holding out your hand fisted, with the knuckles kicking like they have always done. I slip my tiny wiggly fingers between your dry chapped ones. It looks like it’s going to be one of those nights. You, hunched back, heavy head, hanging low at the pivot of your neck .Me, bosom ready, waiting to catch the heaviness of your sadness at the meeting of my dairy tap. Your chest is another locked closet. Full of unshared secrets. The caskets that reside in the pit you call your soul host scary ghosts that send shivers down my spine whenever you pop the lid open. You tell me,she smiled at you  like an angel ,clandestine. She loved you. Like really really loved you.I want to wake her up,ask her why she loved you that much.If now what I have to offer is crumbs in comparison to rich platters.But I am crumbling with you.Have crumbled since the day we first met.Since the day I asked you over to my parents’ house,and in a drowning voice you said yes,and even though you wanted to offer me the same kind of kindness, you couldn’t.I have been  begging God for the strength to carry you through another storm. I have this same sadness lodging at the center of my chest. And your tears,your tears flow like the crumbling end of a river  bank,I have no umbrella wide enough to shield you.So we keep holding each other,murmuring,it is going to be alright.It is going to be alright.

You are telling me about the soft porridge and the  ketchup.About why this combination reminds you of her  so much.You say casually,Like its an everyday picture,you see,that she ate her porridge in a tin plate,adorned with cracking rusting spots and a swirl of ketchup.We laugh.Like I knew her.Like she was just another neighbor,eccentric in her own way.We laugh this damp mist  lighter  and lighter until our laughter sounds croaked and fake,until it feel s like it’s a sad laugh,the kind you know is hiding deeper things,things like the bleeding gums you pretended you never saw.And  you just say it like that.Like bleeding gums is nothing to worry about.Sometimes she managed to swallow a spoon.Sometimes only half.You continue talking.I see the light dim from your eyes.My heart is slipping bait that doesn’t know how to catch a drowning soul.I have not known this sadness but I feel yours like a winter breeze.It leaves me seeking for a body,any body to hold me close.You hold on to your whisky like a day without it would surely mean sudden death.Like you say a day without me would feel like.

 But my mother is alive, my mother is not the one 6 feet deep. So how can I know,how can I know how to grief when to grief for and how long  to grief for a body you sometimes wished dead.You watched her flesh depart from  her body like the fleeing whites from great Zimbabwe.Sudden as if the flesh had not rightfully belonged.The nights when she woke up soaked in seas of sweat and her whole body  dancing  to the tune of rigors and chills.When headaches visited and revisited often and her bowels groaned and moaned and spluttered and drained.You watched her.You bathed her.You wished for her to go.To go first.

Tonight he is lying lifeless,like a deflated balloon at the end of a flying trip.He has this eyes that will stare deep into space like space is occupied by an invisible thing.The monsters in his head keep  eavesdropping.He knows they are listening to his thoughts.They are like his brothers and sisters.The ones  who pass one street away so they avoid his open gate.They have forgotten the dawns he used to walk hand in hand with, in search of school uniform money for them,so they would not show their black binocular bottoms to the staring world.This life,You raise a rose thinking someday you will smell its sweetness only to get the thorns pricking you.Just because he queues for a refill he is now called a Sabrina inmate.Ridiculed like once people did not rely on  his one kilogram brain they now call mad.I want to tell you about him.Tell you how I want you to meet him before the wires go hay wire and he cannot tell if I am his daughter or one of the voices in his head.But you see,you are drowning in your sorrow.Talking about him,how unwell he is,it is like going to Sowa Pan,and gathering the crystal salt into a mountain heap,and asking you,sore crusted and bleeding to play African sliding game,you know the one you sit at the top of a sloping hill with your bare buttocks popping from the torn trousers and you slide all the way down ,laughter and giggles rumbling straight from the deeps of your belly,except my dear,when  I start saying my father,your eyes will be black and blue,as you remember your own father’s  unsaid goodbyes.

Tonight we lay side by side,like lost lovers we do not know where the morning will find us.You say you are tired.Tired of this life.The more you talk about your tired the more I feel tired too.

That night, you held your hand fisted, with the knuckles kicking. I slipped my tiny helpless fingers between your dry chapped ones, hoped in silence that your breathing would eventually resonate with mine. Calm and collected!

But your chest was still a  locked closet.