Things We Lost In The Fire

The Man

The air was a mixture of smoke and chaos. We doused the wooden door with water as the flames slipped past the gaps around the edges taking out the curtains from the outside. I remember thinking about the religious theories forming in my parents’ heads, the flashes of witch aunties and evil uncles trying to steal their son’s joy, as it was only two days to my convocation ceremony. I could already smell the anointing oil (olive oil) seeping into my forehead, running down my face, mixed with loud prayers and saliva. I would without a doubt go through all that shit because it is only in Africa that the devil starts fires.

This was back when I still had strong faith in God and honest politicians. The world was blazing with unrestricted optimism and everything seemed possible, but just like every story of disappointment and pain, it started with hope. And I had a lot of it. I believed in hope and Obama. I believed in the promise of utopia that is forged by such lofty principles; Miracles and Prayers. I was young, dumb, and broke. The devil’s flames took everything; cars, furniture, paintings, books, and what was left of my father’s sanity. An already broken man was shattered by fire, the flames found its way through cracks made throughout his life. Daddy was 70 when the beautiful backdrop of flaming concrete was cast behind a performance of exploding cars. Somehow we had managed to escape through the back, elevating ourselves over the fence by mounting the a/c compressors and leaping into our neighbors’ compound. We watched in our pajamas as our lives evaporated into the clouds. I remember my father taking a final look at his family.

Months later, I wondered to myself: What was he thinking? Did his heart break from the tears he saw in my mother’s eyes or was it the ashes smeared on his dark cheeks? Did he forget his God? I believe he realized the futility of hope and the triviality of prayers which made him burst into laughter and race into his burning home. He was probably heading back into his living room where he had his prayer chair, maybe he wanted his daily dose of salvation from the sinful thoughts that were just beginning to overcome him. Was that weak or wise? Doesn’t matter, he is gone now.

Where do people go when they die? That’s one of the dumb questions that led to the over romanticization of death and fantasies of the afterlife. Something about the human mind is unable to accept the finite nature of death. We desire a point, a reason in a chaotic universe where things happen at random. Take for example the concept of time, time is not real because it is different for each person because we don’t all run out of time at the same time, hence it is illogical to assume we operate within the same time. I wonder if Dad was tired of being a subject to time and thus in his way decided to stop time, whether he wanted it to stop for a moment or forever, doesn’t matter any longer. He’s gone now.

The Woman

Every evening I take short walks with the palm trees, a habit I picked up from my mother. We had started to take more walks together when she got admitted to the retirement home. I made sure to visit every weekend so we would stroll out. She talked about Dad a lot which was usually the perfect segue to drill me about getting married which was ironic since I knew she hated her first two marriages. Mom met Dad and quickly fell in love with him, spending all her fortune on him. This later turned out to be another mistake as he abandoned her for the fire. I always pointed it out to her to which she usually replied saying:

“Every book in there, I wrote

Some, not too proud of, some I wish I could burn,

So many pages I wrote, I wish I could rewrite them,

But there was no eraser and the best advice I got is to keep writing”

“Well, I have decided to be a doctor instead, none of this writer business. How about that?”

I often replied while kissing her wrinkled forehead that always seem to have traces of olive oil on it. At 76, just six years older than Dad before he died, my mother was still optimistic about love being the currency for happiness. She understood that though she never found the love she wanted, it was worth the effort. It was remarkable just how foolish that was but I have come to accept that maybe such folly is the only sedative we have to life.