The scent of rich native soup welcomes me as I step into the room still struggling to pull off my stockings. I smile. Today is a good day.

Counting off my fingers, I try to guess the ingredients of the soup before I make it to the kitchen. There will be seasoned dry fish, snails, shrimps, large chunks of beef and periwinkle. I am salivating already.
“Mummy, good afternoon,” I say, hovering around the kitchen door and she looks up from the sink where she’s slicing uziza leaves.
“Good afternoon, how was school today?” My mother on a regular day is a severely beautiful woman but she radiates when she cooks. Whenever she’s in the kitchen conducting magic and all the sorcery that goes on inside it, she almost literally glows.
“Fine, thank you.”
She nods her head in response. “Come and help me wash the periwinkle.”
I step into the kitchen and begin the dance. Wash periwinkles, sieve crayfish, stir the pot on the fire, taste, add seasoning cubes, boil water, turn semovita – it’s all familiar.

When I regain consciousness, I am serving my father his food, eager to go and eat mine. I dip my semo into the soup, making sure to decorate the morsel with the ngwo-ngwo in my plate. As I taste it, I sigh in relief. When I’m done, I pack my empty plates, tell my parents thank you and pack their plates too. As I tidy the kitchen and take the bowls of soup and stew to the fridge, I attempt to guess how long they will last. How long will the peace at home last?

***

“What are we eating today?” I hold my breath in anticipation.
“Yam,” my mother’s sister answers flippantly, her mind obviously somewhere.
“Fried yam again? I don’t want to eat yam!” my brother stomps his feet and I smack his head.
“Don’t you know you’re outside!” I hiss, eyes darting around in order to make sure nobody heard him. He scowls at me but I ignore him, receding into myself and continued the journey home deep in thought. Today might not be a good day.

The house is quiet except for the sound of sizzling oil. I greet my mother and she nods absentmindedly, “Go and take your bath.” That night, after a plate of hot fried yam that I didn’t mind much, I lie still in bed and will the sound of the night to drown the arguments coming from my parent’s room.

***

Throwing my backpack into a corner, I jumped on my bed. Friday meant no school the next morning so I lie in my singlet and tights daydreaming. We’d eaten yam for one week straight and I knew no peace for that one week.

On Monday, it was the way my father slammed the car door.
On Tuesday, somebody pressed the toothpaste from the middle but no-one will admit it so I guess we live with ghosts now.
On Wednesday, my brother and I were late for school because there was a screaming match after someone didn’t turn off the tap entirely and the borehole water wasted.
On Thursday, I caught my mother crying and wondered what I was good for if I couldn’t make her tears stop.

Today is Friday and I’m scanning her face for questions and answers. Is she hurt? Have I done something? Do I need to do something? If she notices my apprehension, she doesn’t address it. She just makes a show of going to my wardrobe and looking through my clothes until she finds one that suits her. “Have your bath and change,” she says as she hands me the clothes without offering any explanation. She leaves before I can ask where we’re going and I take all of ten minutes to dress up, pausing every now and then to do a happy dance.

It’s 5pm when we file into the car and take off, with no explanation whatsoever. If it were to be this present day, my deep unseriousness coupled with anxiety and sense of humor would have concluded that my brother and I were going to be sacrificed. Think Isaac in the Bible. I digress.

The drive is a long one and I sit at the back of the car, holding my brother’s hand, mine trembling with fear and excitement. However, I don’t stay awake for the length of the trip. I’m shaken awake by my mother and I take a while to register where I am and the fact that my mother is beaming. Why is she smiling so brightly? I’m still groggy as we get out of the car and into the biggest supermarket I’ve ever been in. In the true shameless fashion of children, I twirl around in awe, zipping across aisles of products I had only seen on the TV. My brother shares my excitement as we take turns pointing out things from our favorite ads and giggling unabashedly. We bought ketchup and pita for shawarma, there was peanut butter in our shopping cart, a carton of Hollandia evaporated milk, and other items I considered fancy.

On the way back home, I kept staring at the shopping bags, elated that they were coming home with me and scared that they would somehow disappear. That week I found out what cornflakes tasted like and discovered a new love of my life. Chocolates. I had meat pies for dinner and watched as joy pranced around in my parents’ eyes whilst my brother and I thanked them profusely. Lying in bed with the taste of meat pie fresh on my tongue – because at ten years old I thought not brushing my teeth was an act of rebellion – I decided that happiness should be found outside of ourselves. That it must be handed to you.

***

I confirmed my theory when I failed out of med school years later. I saw my father shrink and watched my mother’s shoulders jerk from behind because I couldn’t bear to see the tears fall in person. That night, I cried tears of my own as I begged the earth to open up and claim me as hers. I wasn’t interested in being a medical doctor but for the people who buried their happiness in my chest, I wanted to try my best. All that didn’t matter though because I had failed and no amount of pleading for a second chance had saved me or the people I disappointed. It was the first time I considered not being good enough.

The second time was the Christmas after the year I turned 22. I returned home dead in the night because we could no longer afford flight tickets. The following morning, it hurt to wake up. The joy that came from being together with my family after a year began to wane. We’d drawn the window blinds to let in the light, and the sunshine made it easy to spot the cracks on the wall. I was transported to when we first moved in. In those early days, I could barely sweep the whole house because I considered it too big. Now, the house that seemed grandiose looks minute to me and I am trapped in it.

For the first time in years, there were no chickens under the staircase leading to the boy’s quarter. There was just beef. Lots of it. And if I fry my knorr chicken cubes in hot oil before throwing in the chunks of beef, frying it and serving myself two pieces, it was easy to forget that there was no chicken. That is to say we could put our fists in our mouth and pretend to not be anxious. When we gathered outside under the moonlight as per tradition, the smell of nostalgia wafting in the dry harmattan carried memories of simpler times. We could pretend to forget that we no longer had a generator.

As the first child of an African home, if your home begins to crumble you are expected to transform into a pillar. When you are unable to do so, you are a failure. Even when nobody is saying it, your anxiety doesn’t spare you and you are sure they’re thinking it. I stare at the last chunks of beef in the bucket and at the unusually empty pot of soup I’m stirring and the truth slaps me once again. I have failed to save myself and the people I love.

I might turn 23 soon and living has become a tedious task that I am no longer eager to participate in. It is one thing to be required to be a pillar and another to be a bag of cement without water, sand or a shovel to mix it. Everyone can see the potential but it has remained just that. Potential. When you become an adult, you are expected to know things. In the event that you look in the mirror and can neither recognize yourself nor confirm your politics, you realize that there is a problem. A break in transmission and you are floored by both the expectations and the uncertainty.

When you look up from the toilet seat and all you can see is the blue bottle of handwash in the house whose rent you can barely afford instead of the window it is sitting on, you know that you are in deep, deep trouble.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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