What truly happened that night? Did you actually rise from the bed from the strike of thunder and fall back down like a log of wood? Do people die like that? How can we wake up to the news that you are no more, and when the night is recounted, faces search one another with questions and logic doesn’t agree? The rain? By thunder? Did that thunder slant-travel into you because you lay closest to the window? The same window from which I had given you sweets two nights before?

When you died, people said someone sent the thunder. Did you know people could send thunder? The rainmakers can send thunder. Like they make rains with incantations, they can mail thunder to kill. But that’s not what I thought. Can you count how many times your mother said, ‘Thunder la sha kwa gi anya there,’ when she was angry? Did she ever think this thunder would actually come and not just pluck out your eyes but your life? Do you know how many times we said, ‘Thunder fire you or Waka,’ as children? I said it to you too. How powerful can the tongue be? Do we create realities with it and blame village people who hate us? Did we snap life from you with our tongues? That thunder, Dubem, have you found who sent it? Was it my tongue or your mother’s?

***

Tonight, it pours again. Every time it rains, I drain in the memory of you. Window rails vibrate. The voices in the sky rumble, and every flash of light sends bolts of shivering through my veins. It’s excruciating not knowing how to really feel. Not knowing how to grow up beyond your memories. All of me paralyses under the envelopment of this darkness and the chill air of the rain. Teach me how people grow up and forget. I want to understand how to be an adult and let go. My heart is a broken canvas of beautiful memories. Of childhood dreams and goals. Do I not sound pathetic? Dubem, what is it like to die before your life ever began?

Did you not say you would be an engineer? That you would build a machine that turned leaves into money because my mother slapped me for misplacing a thousand naira note and said the money wasn’t plucked from trees. What about that day you cried and refused to go to school without me when I had a fever? What were we even thinking when we drenched ourselves and books playing under the rain?

Was it really you I saw in the rain the night after you died? How could you smile and wave at me? That peace I saw in your eyes—what is it called? That effortless curving of your lips and the echoes of your giggles. How can you be so happy after you have left us and left me? Why play with the same rain that took you from me? No, Dubem, it felt like you chose the rain over us and me.

Do you remember how your elder brother accidentally spilt the hot water meant for tea on you the morning before the thunder at night? You cried, as your skin burned. Who would have believed that after experiencing such an amount of heat on your skin, you would turn up cold the next morning?

That morning, I heard your mother scream as I washed dishes in our backyard. I ran into the house to find your still body before the altar and your father raking in foreign tongues. Your mother pulled on you and slapped you to jolt you out of the deep sleep, but you never budged.

Which mother can accept going to bed and waking up to a dead child? The same child she had asked to go to bed the previous night, and he begged her for two more minutes of TV time. Your death is just incomprehensible; this pain sneaked in on us. That morning, she begged you to open your eyes and promised you could spend the whole day watching TV if you wished. I am not sure if I cried or screamed that morning. Did I really ever cry? I was as still as you were, but alive. Alive and dead.

Do you recall that Saturday we all held hands to go for morning mass? That Saturday we saw the man who owned the kiosk we got sweets from soaked in the mud on our way. Was that not the first time we heard the word electrocuted? You learned to pronounce it, but it kept cutting in my tongue and you laughed at me. I never wanted to learn it because it was a bad word that meant someone died. When they said he was electrocuted by thunder, did we even know what they were saying? Could we have guessed you would suffer the same fate one year later? Was the sight of him nature’s way of preparing us for your death? Tell me, is that what other people’s death is—a reminder any of us could be next?

Were we not supposed to get married after we grew up? What was that lingering need to always be around each other? Isn’t it this thing called love? Or have you been able to articulate it as something else, like just being kids or infatuation?

My father still speaks of you. ‘What a boy!’ he always says. What were you thinking that evening you took Caprisonne to him and glass saying you would come and marry me better after we grew? Were you even a child? Who considers Caprisonne as palm wine?

We kissed the first time when we were five; do you remember? Your lips barely touched mine, and we blushed, turning away. It was silly—so silly yet beautiful—to have our hearts throbbing that fast and our minds comprehending something beyond our age. But can a child’s mind comprehend romance? Where did we learn it from? On TV or from the streets? Or maybe age truly is just numbers because we just knew it. Numbers that increase inevitably, regardless of whether we grow with them or not. But yours paused at eight. Does time move for you as it moves for me? Slow. Fast. Just there, ever moving, leaving me behind. Did you grow after you died, or have you remained in your small frame?

***

Maybe one day, I will wake up with that maturity—to live above the memories of the rain. To sleep soundly despite the thunder and not be a shivering child. But Dubem, do you believe this will end? That I would outgrow this fear and float above the pain?

I search for you in everything. In the arts I make. I have drawn the thunder, a boy under the rain and a boy floating in the sky. Is this attachment or healing? How long will I stay in this shell? I find you sometimes when I see a smile, a happy child and every time I have felt love.

You should know I will be walking down the aisle with Obinna on Saturday. He is like you in many things. Maybe the you I think and remember. Do you also wonder what we would have been if you were here? Would we have had our three children and lived in America? Maybe not, right? Maybe we would’ve grown to be many other things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Breno Machado on Unsplash