Last night, my father’s son became one amongst the birds of wings and flew away from our hands. He had made his way up to the old building in our compound, straight to the third floor of the abandoned sitting room and mounted on the old mahogany armchair of my father. The same armchair in the same room which all of my father’s children had been restricted from entering after his death. Becoming a bird in a world where we wear sorrow as wings, they gave us wings to fly into many a thing; oblivion and others: the ecstasy of things, which stands as one had once imagined it. This is what my father’s son had told us after our father’s death. In the early hours of today, before the drizzling dew later rained on our roof as our tears of his death, he had climbed up to the sitting room on the third floor of the house. He, being an exorcist and lover of the Gregorian’s chants, mounted on the old rusty 1970s piano of our father and played, as his traditional way and rituals of expelling his thousands of demons. From here, he played, all the Beethoven tunes one after the other, until the whole room was filled with all his demons; the ones he had once told me about. You see, I have watched my sorrows as they grow and turn out to be like birds and demons of wings. Yes, they have danced and flapped their wings trying to fly away with me. Nevertheless, this morning, they have arrived again to bear me in their hands to a land where sorrows are no more. In many cases, they have required me to play them all the songs of the beloved Gregorians, the masters of chant in this lonely room. As his hands cling tight to the notes of the piano, he uttered, they are whispering within my heart and soul about sorrowless land, where there is never a tear to shed again, for we have come to take you away from your many sorrows and into your paradise. Then he breathed his last breath.

 

 

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash