Young and Soulful

A letter to my past 

Dear Little One,

I trust you are doing well, who am I kidding? Of course, you are! You've always been. I still miss being you, that carefree, kind, super ambitious little girl you use to be. You are probably disappointed or even a little bit angry with me, you think I didn't grow up to be the lady you envisioned me to be. 

Well, what can I say? It all started with the zeal of becoming, from how the heart bloomed with creativity and vibrated with positivity. You never saw the gloomy side of anything, a bearer of kindness you were.

You were always strong, not the muscular type of strong though. I mean, how will I forget your extreme courage, the way you took any chance back then. The strength of your heart, how nothing could shake or break you. Even when you got hurt, you hardly cried when you felt pain. I have to tell you that things are not the same because bruised knees were better than a broken heart. The pain of carrying a broken heart is what makes me cry an ocean these days.

Will you still ask me where the heartbreak came from? Even if you don't ask, I will tell you. It came from those emotions you suppressed, those feelings you held hostage in that big heart of yours, the love, pain, insult, you gulped everything down! Well congratulations, it has created a lump in your heart. 

The moment you started carrying all the dark phases of life on your shoulders, the moment you carried all of it like a sheet of paper, it pulled you down. The heartbreak came from the trauma, the trauma came from your resilience, that same resilience that defined you. I forgive you for being naive, for being young but most importantly I forgive you for growing into me.

Time flies, yesterday, you had such a great ambition, a flaming passion, and your tenacity towards any obstacle was transparent, it was contagious and daring! I hope when you look at me now you realize that life doesn't always follow the manual you write and hand in. It always does its editing, rewriting, and rephrasing until it gives you the outline of your destiny, the details in your fate. 

When you look at me, you will see that the lady you dreamt of is now like a dying fire, she now has a weakened heart, and that flower that once blossomed is now withered.

 But, you will always know me to be a fighter, I was and I will always be. The embers of this soul shall rise again. It is not a wish, it is a promise. She will stand rigid in pain, and the scars on her caramel skin will symbolize strength. I shall write you a letter again, maybe, someday.

                                                                                               Yours truly,            

Ummi Aisha 

                                      

About the Writer

Ummi Aisha Aliu is an agronomist on paper and when her hands aren't buried in the soil, they dance to the rhythms of her pen. 

Sometimes a creative writer, sometimes a content writer. In between reading and writing she finds solace, she searches for love in metaphors that do not exist. She writes from Borno state.