Imagine

Imagine:

You are in the backyard, fanning the firewood with mother while she holds the hot pot with her bare hands, your eyes are burning from the smoke. Your mouth is the bellow but you don’t stop because you think the fire is going to come out soon, if only you keep blowing.

Yet, you are wondering how Mother is able to hold the hot pot with her bare hands, you have seen father try it once, it burned him and he almost poured the soup away. But Mother is not flinching; it is like she feels no pain. 

Your curiosity makes you lose focus from blowing the fire; you raise your hand to touch the hot pot of soup that you think is not hot because Mother is holding it. She slaps your hand away, the force of her hand against yours is as painful as stepping on hot coal bear footed, so you squeal and frown.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She says, looking at you like the child that you are.

Now, you are surprised, why wouldn’t she let you touch the pot?

“It’s not hot, is it?” You ask. 

Mother no longer pays attention to your words because she sees the fire dying again, she blows with a hand fan instead of her mouth.

“Touch it and see for yourself, just don’t pour my soup away.” She says again.

  Now you want to touch it, but you hesitate, because a doubt has risen in your mind. Logically, you know it’s supposed to feel hot and practically it does, but you’re confused because Mother held the hot pot. Does she have iron hands? Or doesn’t she feel pain?

  Only one way to find out, you stretch your hands forward and touch the hot pot, immediately you feel the heat and withdraw your finger. It burns you.

Mother smirks, partially mocking you, maybe calling you a fool silently. You look like a snake has just bitten you and you regret having ignored logic, Mother’s the one with a problem. 

“Why would you think it’s not hot?” She asks.

“Cause you held it with bare hands.” You cry out. Now you feel stupid.

Mother chuckles, shaking her head.

“I didn’t start holding hot things with my bare hands in one day; I got burned when I was eight till I couldn’t feel the pain anymore.” You try to understand, but you’re eighteen and you still think life is a bed of roses, if only you knew the roses were made from thorns.

 Mother cooks the dishes and you help carry them inside. You and the family sit at the dinner table to eat a bowl of Eba and Ewedu soup.

You go to bed, still wondering how Mother is able to hold the pot with her bare hands. Coal is different from hot steel but, you think, if Mother was given a red hot steel, she'd hold it too.

Imagine Mother being your mentor, your family isn’t the sophisticated type, you live from hand to mouth, but you learn lessons that’ll sustain you when you eventually buy a home at the top story of success building.

  So Mother is open and you’re always willing to learn from her. You go outside and meet Mother sitting on a bench, you ask her why she is outside and she says.

“I’m having a quiet time.” She replies.

'What is a quiet time and with whom?' You wonder.

You sit by her side and she pats your back, most of the time you think Mother is having conversations with the dead.

“With yourself?” You finally voice out. She glances at you, half smiling, maybe disappointed, you don’t know. But you think she’s not pleased.

“Not with myself, the creator.” She says. 

“It must have taken you something to be able to hold a red hot pot that long.”

“It took me endurance and my Father was tough. He understood life better than we did, he probably saw us heading in the same direction he once did. He toughened us up but we did not make the best of it.”

“That is why you try so hard to make us better.” You say in understanding.

  Now, you both gaze at the moon, it is full and so bright you could see a pin on the floor. You remember stories she has told about the moon and why it is so big, now that you’re thinking of it, you think it is all folk tales. 

Maybe not even real tales, because how could the moon be regarded as a living entity thousands of years ago, or the ocean being  human. You look back on your decisions these past few days, months, opportunities you were supposed to take, that you gave up on because you were so afraid.

 You feel bad and realize you’re also heading in your Mother and Father's direction.  She sighs and starts saying something; you sit quietly and listen because you think this is one of those moments where she gets inspiration from the creator. 

“I had a sister, she died at 30." She whispers with so much pain.

Growing up was never easy for her but she found a way to bloom with grace and so much radiance.

She had bottled up pain nobody knew the cause of, it was obvious, she wore it like a diadem and we couldn’t help her, not even Father.

Sometimes I’d walk into her room and catch her shedding tears, I think it was proof that strong people cry too. Now that I’m thinking, if she could count her yesterdays , she would name them one by one, lay them up straight and weigh every bit of her regret and bad choices. 

Beware, you are still listening, you don’t even notice the cries of the crickets and the croaking of the frogs, all you want to do is stay to the end of this story and probably learn another lesson from.

It was one of her great poems, her poems were better than her life though. She wrote another.

I would go on to the top of the mountain, sing dirges for the dead ones, hoping one day when I die, someone too would sing a dirge for me.

 Now you feel so bad because you think Mother is taking time out to grief her sister. You touch Mother’s cold hands, and say.

“Mother, you seem to know a lot about her feelings.”

She shakes her head and tries to form a smile to bury her grief, but you know it is a lie because you can feel what she feels. 

"Nobody knew her, she hid herself. I understood everything after she passed, because I am in my Father’s shoes. 

He said the road would be rough; there was nothing wrong with the road leading to our house. So childish and naïve we were, we didn’t know he was talking about the path to our future, if only we persisted in those dreams, we definitely would have made it.

It got to a time, Father saw the storm faster than we did, he knew death was knocking incessantly on his door. When he died, she wrote again.

Tomorrow would be great,

the morrow would be great,

sunrise would be great__

In waiting for tomorrow, I have found a foe,

family is lost and myself hidden,

Until I find a tomorrow good for me__

time stands still__ like the heavens and the earth”

Imagine:

After you hear mother speak, tears flow down your eyes, you haven’t seen her so vulnerable in all the lives you have spent with her. She is secretly cleaning her tears but you can see it, you can see them as they stroll leisurely, one drop paving way for the others.

You think she wants to stop but the tears still keep pouring.

You say, “You memorized her poems.”

Mother nods, her eyes are now red and her face still wet with tears.

“She was trying to reach out to someone, we just were too blind to see her pain.”

“What was she hurting from, was it heartbreak?” 

You ask because you don’t know.

 And your mother gazes at the moon before it gets conceded by the dark clouds. Your ten year old brother still thinks the moon is running from the clouds and you almost believe it too, but you have been taught science so you know the moon doesn’t move that fast.

“No dear, she got lost in trying to find herself.” Mother says and she acts like she doesn’t want to say anymore.

So, you have heard a lot and now you don’t know what to do, you have these questions in your head that need to be answered.

You remember the times where you cry silently in the darkness for no reason, you have anger issues and you wonder why. You feel alone and it scares you, your friends are far off making headways and sometimes you feel like life should end in a glimpse.

   Just then, you realize you’re probably going to end up the same way Mother’s sister did, talented but depressed, depression got to her first.

You cry hard, how do you save yourself from this impending downfall, it also seems you will get lost before finding yourself like your anonymous aunt. 

So you go on a quest to dig out all of your aunt's old poems just to find out the source of her pain and to know if you’re not going to die the same way she did.

You fail to realize, Mothers cook up the best stories. You don’t know, Mother never had a sister who was depressed or died. She was trying to teach a lesson in a way that would sink in better.

© Mulero Abibat