Tomorrow is four years to the day since Keffi died. I don’t want to say I wasn’t aware of it. I knew it was coming up, but somehow managed to put it out of my mind, sort of.
Except, I’ve been fighting tears and loneliness, missing something without a precise name.
I am… missing my friend. I am missing my sister, one of the companions of my soul, the one I keep losing early in life, over and over again.
Next time around, I think maybe we will travel all the way through to the other side together. This time she was in pain, but starting to see some light.
How many times have I wondered why my sister left me here to struggle on alone. Sometimes I cannot answer the question, other times I hear her tell me, “I know you are par for the course,” with all this confidence I never expected.
I miss the way she believed in me, I miss her squeezed-eye laughter, her cornrows and her ivory ring. I miss the ying and yan wreathed in flame on her ankle that I envied in her life and now crave as a proof of my own existence. I crave it as existence of my growth her passing has forced me into.
I wonder if she has come back yet and if I will meet her somewhere again and recognise her.
I wonder if her betrayers know how much I want to rip the veil of their insensitivity and arrogance away and show them how much they are as guilty as the so-called “leukemia” that they say did her in. I wonder how much I want to spit in their faces and how I loathe their presence because of they are still here, mired in their hypocrisy.
I wonder if the woman that has usurped her children knows how much I know she coveted them and her reasons why.
They don’t. They were and are so wrapped up in themselves, all they see is what they want and wanted, and never factored her into their plans, other than as a convenience of varying sorts. They still don’t factor her into the decisions they make with her children.
I cannot hate. How can you hate those so pitiful; those who will never escape the reach of karma. Karma is all that keeps me silent, to be honest. She paid hers back, and they will have to pay back theirs, and it’s not between me and them anyway.
I miss her. I miss her in every way you can miss a friend. Her advice and counsel about England would have been invaluable and all I can do is accept whatever blessings she is sending me. She is definitely sending some. I can feel them.
Yet… I still miss her.
Miss her terribly. I can never say it too much, or find it is never true. Every moment I live I miss her.
How is it that four years has just slipped right by? I am amazed how life is like a River rushing to meet the Sea. I am amazed how used to something you can become, and how when you really love someone, they’re never really gone from the world, because their energy doesn’t die, only transmutes, and they live on truly in your heart and exist there and everywhere else as well.
Modupe Keffi. Your sister misses you still. I have a candle burning for you.
Add comment