If home is where the heart is, where do we go when we can’t go home? I posted this on my WhatsApp status sometime ago and Doris my best friend replied and said “You wander.” I paused for a minute to think about it, about what I do whenever I can’t go ‘home’. I realized that I have been wandering and settling and losing and starting the cycle over. I just wasn’t self-conscious about it. I have had my own fair share of wandering—wandering and searching for something, someone, anything, as long as I could have them to call my home, because I have been lost, abandoned, rejected, forgotten and couldn’t go to the place where my heart is, my home.
In my phases of lost and wandering, I had a direction, I didn’t know where I was heading but I knew what I was leaving, I knew who was not accepting me, I knew why I was stranded. I have always had some sort of bearings to my emotions until May.
May 2022
I woke up one morning and it felt as if my joy had ousted from my soul, and the fort which held me together had dissipated into thin air. My sanity came crumbling down and for the first time, I was lost without a sense of awareness. I couldn’t place a finger on why I felt so much grief and sorrow. I would cry day and night because my soul was grieving something—I didn’t know what! Tragic urh?
In May I thought about this a lot. I thought about all the days I wandered, because my home wasn’t receptive of me.
Darkness walked into my life and took a seat, that depression was so dense that even my coping mechanisms became worthless. What is a living thing without a coping mechanism? Especially in this crazy world we live in. I became a living dead. It is one thing to be dead and another to be dead while alive. The latter, is not a thing I’d wish for anyone, not even upon my worst foes. Somewhere between my mind and my heart was an empty ocean, sterile and completely bereft of life. I had no grain of light left inside of me, I was ready to leave, I was terrified of the raging silence that stood still beside me at night, I was frightened but mostly of my own self.
I found comfort in the dark and in my sleep. On nights I could not sleep, I stayed up, completely futile and watched the night while away in its lull gentleness. Some nights, I wrestled with myself to keep me here.
A memory of fear
I have a memory of my grandfather and his wife (my father’s step-mom) beating the life out of me. His wife after wrestling with me on the floor and had planted multiple slaps on my face, instructed my grandfather to go for the machete, they laid me on my uncle’s Carpenter’s bench and held me bound, after spanking my behind for a considerable amount of times. I head my grandfather say “this is the time to kill her”. Out of panic I raised my head and saw my grandfather hold the machete up, waiting for only God knows when to finally execute me. I remember a teacher from the school near our house come to my rescue. My childish mind could not fathom the idea that my grandparents were capable of a thing like that. I have lived with the trauma of having a machete held over my head by people I loved. I have come to believe that their intentions wasn’t to kill me but to scare me. But how do you fix a childhood trauma of fear imbedded by family?