I Can Do It With A Broken Heart
All the Lights We Cannot See
When a horse breaks its legs, ye put it out of its misery because it’ll never heal right.
As I go through these gates, I realize I can’t fill your minds anymore with Awolowo’s Diary series. They were one of the best ways to shine a light on the dark past I believe the Lord would still deliver me from—the shackles of my troubled past.
When I wrote the Giggles and Grades series, they reminded me of life, life before life began. Life before reality started setting in and jokes stopped being an easy escape on troubling rainy days.
Not the light rainy days now, but the ones that forcefully pull off the roof that ought to serve as a shelter, the ones that beat you through every layer of clothing.
When it comes to pain, I’ve sought healers and found none. Some wounds never healed, some scars are just proof that you survived, and some memories are now curses, even though, they were once blessings.
When I gathered the anthology — For the Love of Everything Good, I didn’t think I’d ever house the thought of putting all my unsaid thoughts into a book that others could read.
In 4 years, I have learned better that a story told is a life lived. I have also learned that for every courage taken to share those stories, the pain eases in return.
Like a caged bird, each word unlocks the cage and ultimately sets it free on the back of sentences, be it well structured or not.
A man once said.
I’ve not loved a person who did not deserve a small space of permanence in my heart.
I believe it is true.
I still believe the hatred we show to our exes is faux — not genuine. We act beside ourselves with the intent of not wanting to show that what was felt was pure enough to cure the maladies of this life.
We abandon that divine light — the true and innocent emotion that once birthed a conviction of love. That emotion is arguably stronger than the mother-child bond. It was produced by a low valency element, eagerly ready to attach itself to another for support, affection, and provision of stability.
A funny paradox in life is that the best bonds are the ones you didn’t or don’t struggle to keep together.
Perhaps, we are just atoms.
We are so insignificant, yet so important in the quest to find balance in this earth. We are little, yet great. Here lies the existential paradox of the human soul. Pertinent, but only within context.
As I go through these gates, I realize I can’t fill your minds anymore with my romantic adventures. The ones about — the nymph, the older lady, the rich feminist, the angry colleague, the lovely kid, the FWB, the church girl, the bitchy babe, the brat, and the thief.
I can’t fill your minds with my uninterested attitude toward the Super Bowl, the campaign to get adults to stop playing FPL, the journey to places I have mixed feelings about, the charge to stay wicked (especially on weekends), the cinema adventure of watching a movie and sleeping, and why I left my last barber.
There is no need to repeat these stories to you again.
The good news is…
I’ll fill your mind with other things.
Stories you can relate to. The ones that are like a house you are comfortable enough in. They are as familiar as your lover’s skin. They are great stories, the ones that you know the end from its beginning. The ones you trust the process for.
The ones that keep you wanting to read the next word. The next sentence. The next paragraph. The next page.
Each word, is a description that sends your imagination on an errand.
When Will the Writings End?
Maybe when the skies are not there to look up to. Maybe when the experiences no longer occur. These experiences have become the bleached bones of all my stories.
The truth is my heart is letting the pain out with every piece, some are happy stories, others informative, and some are sad tales. The whole amalgam is intense, and I dare say that the pain is, to say the least, excruciating.
It is, but I can write, and live through the days.
I can smile, blow a kiss, hug, show kindness, be tenderhearted toward another, forgive, and love.
More so, I can write.
I can do it, even with a broken heart.
I can do it, even though there is a light I can’t yet see. I can do it, with all the numbness my heart experiences, I can do it, hoping that one day, I won’t have to do it all alone.
I can do it with a broken heart.
