Home

Home is the scent of stale air-locked up in a house bordering the road. Where remaints from gusts of wind thrown up by the speeding cars settle on the louvres.
Home is the darkness of a pale yellow wall and the hole in the wall bored in by my father’s constant stares. Sometimes he bends his head and looks down. At his swollen feet. At legs that have failed him and have trapped him.
Home is the silence stretching across right years after the night the blood clot found its way to his brain. It is the thickness of words that do not roll off an unused tongue.
Home is the soft mourning cries of my mother. Head buried in the scent of urine and disinfectant. In the silence of an unfaithful partner that has brought disease into their marital bed. It is the shrieks that follow the smell of excreta passed into the soft cotton of adult diapers.
Home is a place to run away from. A dark dank place that seizes laughter from our lips. On days when we tried to act the average Nigerian family, we would be reminded that the families which we so badly wanted to be did not need to lift their fathers off the floor to which he had fallen.
Home is six of us. Holding on to the fragments of what once was and wishing it into being again. Bottles of olive oil and holy water beside bed stands. Stains from viscous liquid flung at evil spirits soaked up by the wall. Reminding us to pray louder, a cacophony of voices lost in eight years of silence.