Daddy, Daughter & Dementia (Letters to my Dad)
Oozing, the state of heart.
Dear Dad,
I’m in-love with metaphors, and colors and dreams, even ones that make me climb so high only to make a dent on my heart once I fall. I love turning everything into art, it’s my way of life. It helps me carry the wonder in vessels that I can come back to, revisit them in my journals of black ink, or hear them in the chords of my guitar of a song I am yet to finish. Even the misery too, like a demon, once it finds a home in one of my poems or songs, it can be tamed. Do I get this way of being from you? I don’t know. But I remember one evening in our old house in Dodoma, I had looked at you with teary eyes and I saw a layer of water forming in your eyes too. And like I’ve read in countless science articles on the internet, it looked more like what active “mirror neurons” would do, HSP kind, I mean.
I might have inherited a little of your relentless spirit, a little of your soul easier to break, a little phoenix in you that likes to dance in the fire. It’s a hard world if you happen to feel too much, but where do I draw the line? A line between what’s too personal and what’s publicly shareable, what sets free and what binds, what calls me to open my heart and what needs only my indifference as response. Must I draw a line? What if I want to draw a curve instead, to provide permission to sink into the depth of whatever that needs to be felt?
Mmmh mmm (clears throat), Allow me to interrupt with lines from a poem, one of my favorites by Lucille Clifton.
Come,
Celebrate with me,
Everyday something has tried to kill me
And it has failed.
I think we can all relate to this poem. Life is that vulnerable, every breath we take is another chance of a lurking danger to come devour us. But then, there’s also God. God who loves the practice of breathing, I wouldn’t see a reason for Him to create some little creatures he would need to sustain with a breath in every single “mmmmhh” and “haaaaa.” More than 20,000 times a day?, the only way to explain you love someone so radically to do something for them that many times a day. I mean he’s God, he could have decided for us to take one breath or a couple to sustain us for the whole day, but nah. He likes the idea of touching our noses with his each time after an exhale. So let’s just breathe Baba, if we are touching noses with the Author of Life each second, the fear of dying shouldn't rule us. While we breathe, I will keep writing about us in my journals and songs and poems. Because to record, Baba, I have found is a way I can save memory.
In a world where someone is dying at some part of the world every minute, I don’t want to die without having written about us. Our brains’ capacity to remember might fail us, but if I can get our names on permanent ink, I might have saved us. My English might be broken, my word choice not perfect, and maybe one day I might even look back at this with regret. But see Dad, it’s exactly the human experience. To be human is to sign up for love and loss, it's to let your heart be oozing.
Closing note Dad, if someday you would ever come to dislike these letters, forgive my stupid soul. It was the only way I was able to share with the world a sweet melody, out of this minor key. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade? Yeah, we could also make lemon drop candy but, whatever.
Love,
Your feeling too deep daughter.
2 Corinthians 4:16 AMP
Therefore we do not become discouraged [spiritless, disappointed, or afraid]. Though our outer self is [progressively] wasting away, yet our inner self is being [progressively] renewed day by day.
"To be human is to sign up for love and loss"...............so true