
“They said you came looking for me. I didn’t drown; I was the water.”
—Jo Nketiah
*
i used to be a child, learning to call grief by its name;
learning to say my own name.
i am grown now, and see that i do not merit the burden of existence;
i cannot carry the earth’s cross.
i am water— i swallow my flames; i drown myself;
the earth spits me from its mouth; air runs away from me.
do you not understand?
how does water become wind?
how does one become what he chases after?
i run to writing fiction in a bid to escape my reality.
in my stories,
i burden my characters with my pain and watch them suffer, knowing well that
it is i who suffers.
this is how i predict my end.
nothing works. it’s the same end over and over:
a character gifts his neck a rope and the breeze caresses spasming limbs.
i am a dangling participle; no one knows whom i address.
i am a subject who dies to his object.
THE AUTHOR

Ubee is tired.
This is gold. 🖤
Well done!