Hi lovesss!
I hope your coffee is kind to you, and lunch comes to you on time.
This week, I want us to reflect on healing.
This poem is for someone I love dearly. The first stanzas which I wrote three years after his passing are about the pain and the heartbreak. My unwillingness to heal as I felt it is only through my mourning that I keep him alive in me, in this world. It took another two years for me to find a way to let go of wanting this pain to continue and giving myself a closure- that he deserves to rest peacefully. Losing someone you love is never easy and it is completely okay to not be okay. I do not regret my prolonged mourning, and I’m simply grateful I was able to give time to let it all out even if it meant crying almost everyday for years. I found healing through time, and the words of others who also lost people they love. And though I find this poem rather too personal, I hope it finds a way to help you heal.
Five years of (my) selfishness
I still think.
Even three years later,
I breathe
Over the fact that you’re rotting underneath the grey stone where your bewitching name is engraved on it.
How pace by pace you are fading away.
The last time I visited you, I wanted to hold the stone and scream for you to come back just one last time.
I do not want you rot.
The coffin flies, the tiny creatures devouring over your rotting body-
This thought keeps lingering.
I still do not find it fair.
You’re too beautiful to rot.
I want you with me.
I love you.
Every dead man becomes a mere body.
Living people forget about their existence as a person.
Not you.
You still live in my dreams, my thoughts and in the places we visited.
I do not want to ever forget you.
Your name.
So I keep you close.
So I keep your name close.
So close.
I tell my friends of you still.
About the grandpa who loves to put his legs on tables and taught me to do the same.
The grandpa who made me promise to marry the man of his choice after I’m old enough when I was about eleven years old? (Laughs)
The grandpa who managed to crack jokes even with oxygen mask on.
The grandpa who held my hand as his breath was slowly fading.
You aren’t a past, grandpa.
You are and will always be part of my now.
Till I become a then.
I know you’re in a better place now.
But I’m just too selfish to let go.
How can I just let go?
It has only been three years.
I dream of you.
And I still cry.
These words I scribble
As I find myself crumbled under
A brand new blanket,
Trying to find your scent.
Two years later,
Five years after your passing,
I learnt to cry less.
And soon, very less.
I learnt to hurt less
And soon, accept your ever sealed goodbye.
Five years later,
I remember every bit of you
I will ever love
And I will set you free.
Someone once told me-
“When you mourn over someone too much,
They fail to find their way home.”
And till I soak myself in this pain,
How can you be free then?
I will always want you to come back. The stench of me I love best is the stench of you that lies within me.
But I scribble back again
These words-
“I set you free, grandpa.”
Go, find your home.
-Sekulu Nyekha
Gigantic love sealed with prayers,
Seku
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