Who No Hears

life

№: 1

46.2020

At times, many times, the urge to fulfill others – to fill myself up with the noise and voices, to take all of the outside in and gobble it down with a shot of anxiety – is everywhere I turn my face. It is to me, one of the most compelling feelings yet the reality of what I face each time. How I circulate the differing fluid feels that emanate from the extremities to the heart is a path clouded. There are ways I have dissociated the body from the mind, from the spirit, from the emotions, from the earth – in ways that make me wake up each morning and try to collect these parts of me. If I'd like, I put on some way that I'd like to look, place in my bag notes that I never read but that remind me I used to once collected, place aside my Kenyanness because it won't be needed, decide I want to smell a little nicer and watch myself walk to take the school bus. I never felt so divided up yet fitted all into one. I feel that I need to feel the earth below my feet but there's so much I don't know about the earth that I am walking on. If you look close enough at the eyes – they give it all away.

I chase memory.

No longer do I record moments because they, in part, I tend to plan to go out, plan to eat, plan to dance, and recording thrusts me into trying to control the past in the present. Give me time, this is where I am. I will learn again to forget.

Being in temporary disarray happens more often than I would like. And when I consider context, I reason to blame dislocation from memory. My past roots became upset and tried to adjust to new ground. Deep they sank into the self, only to unearth fears and dreams I have to consider giving up for a future that wants to etch itself onto me. I gaze, and my mouth wriggles into the shape shame if I bend to it.

For the best. They reckon.

Everyone out there – beating out their chests and wrapping warmly their seductive selves. So hangs the overcast skies. Bidding for the rain to plunder the earth with tears that ache.

I look up so the sky will replace my dried up ducts.