One day I would talk about how children grow with resentment toward their families. How your family can be an enabler. How love can make you wear silence. How not wanting to hang your dirty linen outside leaves the room with an ugly smell. Today is not that day. Today I’d be in bed, crying to Abba. Check up on my clan. Worship. Sleep. Go on a prayer walk with excellence when she comes. Smile. Eat silence and think to myself how silence tastes like guilt and hate and bile and memories and pain. How eating silence feels like eating glass, a million shards cutting everywhere from your mouth to your anus.

Today is not the day. A week from now, I’d text my sisters and ask for help. A week from now because my mind withdraws for a while after trauma comes visiting; Temmie said it’s dissociation. I believe it is my mind extending kindness to me. It is my mind holding me.

Today I would gaze at the sky. Attempt transplanting Alusi. I’d play with David. I’d question Abba. I’d laugh. I’d read. I’d sing; because I’m grateful for my clan. Because I know that when push comes to shove I would wear my slippers and take a ride to the next state, I’d draw and do a couple of random stuff and at night, I would vomit this pain because my body holds no room for anything other than love. Today is not the day.

Today is not the day I talk about how you wear trauma so often that you literally can’t imagine a life that doesn’t hold space for trauma. It’s not today I talk about how my feelings start in my tummy first. How language is an unreliable tool and I would rather wring my heart over you so all the feelings would be extracted. Today is not the day I talk about how a queasy stomach is most often the first sign of my heart acting out. A proof that I’ve failed again. That being Christian doesn’t erase bad from happening. That the distance between women and abuse is not up to a dot, that harassment can be very casual.

Today, I’d tell you that pain links all the parts of my body to my heart. It starts in my tummy then spreads to my head and from there, my limbs receive the signal. It’s such a raw emotion that I haven’t learned to find expression for it, so I sit by my pain and whisper to it: “soon, my love.” You are justified but daddy is going to take care of it. I hold its hands loosely so it slips away easily when Abba comes for it.

All the broken shards have been ground to sand but on its own, sand isn’t good for building. Structures are made with a mixture of sand and something to ensure they last. I’m sand.