To my next of kin - by Esther Omemu

To my next of Kin,When you write a memoir about me, the first line must start with a quip about something that is outrageously untrue. So that when the rest of me fills the pages, you would have laughed enough to bear the weight of the tears that would surely come. The story should be long enough but not too much that it bores the people who must see me lie on the white print, thoughts and brains spilling out, weightlessly. But it cannot be short because the complexity of my small existence would reach a thousand pages and still ask for more. When you start, talk about flowers. I knew nothing about them but I wrote a lot about velvety petals and men who held their delicateness with fingers made of shattered glass. Perhaps I was fascinated by the idea that people have still not learnt how to tend to them, gentle and sweet. I was one of those people except I would not hold them in my hands when I knew I would only cause them to bleed. I am not saying I was perfect but I knew better than to lie, bold face, unyielding and ignorant. This part of me would run until the end of this memoir, if you chose to write it. Talk about flowers and glass. My heart was made of glass, the kind that stopped bullets and would not burn. Nothing about me was soft or warm or fuzzy to hold. I bristled in the sun and shells grew out my back at the slightest touch. I never wanted to change, I couldn't even if I tried. Some days, I stuck my face in the sea and tried to mimic the flow of water under my eyes. I thought if I cried, let my hair down and put my hands over burning wood, I would be warm and soft like all the pretty girls in the novels. It was foolish to think that I could fold myself into corners, or that I could bury this loud mouthed, opinionated, bigfoot, closed-heart child that was sitting stoned faced between my ribs.Don't forget the parts about flowers, glass, and laughter. Every piece of me laughed and when the storms brewed loudly, a sudden chuckle was the only thing I knew how to give. If you check my history you will not find tears, not even when life took those that were precious to me and returned them in a jar filled with dust. There was even laughter where silence should have been and I spent my lonely days filling tensed spaces with boisterous echoes that tore out from within and left me filling empty. Laughter saved me, my story will not be complete if I am not honest about this. It was how I learnt to heal and to build walls that no one could see. Although I sometimes willed myself to grieve, to break down and bury my head in sand, but my veins were used to so much humour that they rode constantly on that high. Talk about flowers, glass and how laughter was my gift to this world.When you have penned down enough thoughts, remember to write about flowers, glass, laughter and an unfinished canvas. I might have lived my life like the painting stuck at the end of the pile, full of the artist's hopes and dreams, beating with colours from nature’s finest chest but still incomplete. I lived yearning, wishing, waiting— eyes searching to the light at the end of the tunnel, lost to yonder. So remember, when you write about me, write it like a garden with broken glass beneath the soil. Let the laughter bloom wild, even if the roots are tangled. Leave the canvas unfinished. That’s how I lived—half-painted, half-praying, wholly trying.

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