She sat staring at the window panes; different portraits of African wealth and roots circulated at the back of her mind. From women and men drinking traditional beer using a calabash and collecting water from the rivers and main streams that gave life to the green pastures using this very same calabash.

And there sat a broken calabash with no life, no hope that it could be of use again, and as she stared at it she wanted to put into action the meaning of giving life to something. All she could do was try to backstitch it, and she succeeded, but the scars were still there just like a heart mends when it is broken. She related so much to this vision, to an extent that she penned this down.

This reminded her of the teenage love affair with her boyfriend. Her loneliness and inability to be vocal about a lot of things that didn’t sit well with her soul led to her being friends with the ink and the paper. She would write everything down including the emotional slurs that cut very deep. How she wished that God would send an angel that would open its eyes allowing them to crawl deep into her messy heart soaked in blood, and tell him that he has reawakened the bitterness in her. She wanted someone to be the middlemen that will tell him, through his recklessness he has opened a closet of skeletons that she buried a long time ago and lastly tell him that the treasures of the world that he can’t seem to get over will soon be pleasures of her heart which bleed.

One day she finally gave in. She ripped her entire being revealing her pain and finally admitting that she has felt the pain big time and a part of her slowly accepted things as they are. As she kept going back to him giving him endless chances he did not deserve, she learned something through the things they faced. The thing is that he wasn’t down for her as much as she was. He also was not willing to sacrifice for their love as much as she did over the years and that was the saddest truth she ever discovered.

She sometimes told herself that the chemistry between the both of them is a tale to be told by the unfortunate who yearned for what they had not known happened behind closed doors. Even though she saw that there was nothing left for her in the relationship, she stayed; talk about contentment.

When sneaking glances at it, all she could see were dead remains of wilting plants, figuratively, telling a story about the good old days. She sometimes sat and allowed her mind to go down the memory lane with regret. She regretted taking him in again because things that they faced when they dated previously resurfaced again, this wasn’t what she has in mind, she pictured a happily ever after, but this was a happily never after.

She dealt with things that were bigger than she had imagined and those things cannot be changed, they were constant. Sometimes all we can do is to sit back and watch everything fall apart, it is then up to us to decide if we want to make peace with what is beyond our control.

Through writing she got to escape societal norms. When she got into this world she got to be in awe of sunrises and got to let her imagination take her to a place where the sun doesn’t set and that’s where peace is at.

She spent most of her days trying to master the art of letting go, but every touch from him made her heart dance and triggered her ears to listen to the voice that says, “Undress your soul so that it narrates the way you feel about me”. That’s when his hands caressed along the lines of her body forcing her to utter words that she can’t ever utter by her lips as they vanish into thin air and re-settle inside her.

She sometimes does introspection and asks herself why did I come here? Who crawls back to darkness when they can choose light? It is true when they say people would rather see you broken to feed their miserable souls, souls that cry for peace, and that peace is at the cost of your own emotions and peace.

Love is sometimes not enough because you can have all the love in the world, but if it is not enough to change a person’s mindset it is useless. Her knees always trembled when she thought of moving on. She was too attached as much as he was too, but his attachment was very different. He did not want to let her go, but didn’t want to change either. Regardless of these trials and tribulations, the love never faded. Love hurts you to a point whereby you lose yourself, begging God to help you to let go, but the decision is made by the heart.

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Tell us: What advice do you have for the person in this piece?