Thanks for visiting my blog. This blog chronicles a mostly 4-year journey of love, life, and loss. It's now time to retire. However, feel free to browse and read through the posts.
My current work/projects can be accessed at www.miriamjerotich.com

Monday, December 30, 2013

On Turning 23


God blesses those who mourn for they will be comforted (Matthew 5:4, NLT)


It’s 1 a.m. when Papa phones me and everyone on the floor is asleep. His voice sounds just like it did when I was 12, and Mama fell out of the sky. He tells me you are gone. Gone? I ask how. He tells me you were sick. I ask him why he never told me you were sick. He forgot. He forgot to tell me that your stomach kept hurting when they came to visit you in hospital. He forgot to tell me that you had fainted on Christmas day, when you saw Jesus, when you tasted heaven before you came back and it was only three weeks and then you were gone home for good. I don’t feel when the tears start to burn the hollows and I forget to breath. I am remembering the unwritten email. I am thinking about the girl next door. Was it yesterday that she found out her dad had leukemia and she stayed awake crying? I had sat next to her. Quiet. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know what to say, but here I am too, crying. I claw the carpet. I scratch my leg, my nails drawing along the scars I had etched on myself when I was younger and I had the tantrum. I ask God why. I call the boy. I want him to tell me why. I call the teacher and he tells me that I shouldn’t ask God questions because I might not like the answers He gives me.

So I write. I write to you. A poem. A letter. A song. A tribute. A stream of consciousness. Metaphors no one will understand, memories no one will decipher. An email you will never reply to. I make a video. I write a devotional. I fill a journal. I wear a red scarf and I write about being in the presence of your Great Absence. I write for three years. I write from all the angles I can imagine. I create characters, I set the scenes, I paint the sky grey. I am the doctor who sees you on your last day, I am Mama who washes you, I am the employee who works in the building next door. I am you. I want to take your place. Like the day Mama fell out of the sky, and I asked God to take her broken vertebrae and fuse it with my bones. Is this what they call love? Is this obsession? Pretense? I am in your memories, and yet I am not there? Mama visits me and tells me I am like you, but is this true? Did they see me when I was walking with you, after I hurt myself, after you tell me about God and I had not opened my Bible in weeks, after I mourn about the boy I love who doesn’t love me? Did they see me? Did they see me when I thought to myself that I would always believe in your God, that I would try to live like you if only to see you when I am gone too?

They say my hair is wild so Mama offers to braid it, but the braids unfurl in my dreams, untamed. My hair looks like it did when we were four or five, and I wore that checkered skirt and rainbow shirt. Did you know I wore the same clothes when we had taken a photo that Sunday before in front of Barclays bank? Did you know that a bicycle ripped my ankle and I had to get a dressing every week? Tradition says that I should forget those who are gone, so I remember them when no one is looking. I think about them when I am in the matatu in Eldoret and we are driving from Oasis down Nandi road and I begin counting all the hospitals I have visited. I think about my grandfather when he killed the rabbit and roasted it. I think about my grandmother and the voice that I never heard. I think about my cousins. The car accidents. The strokes. The gunshot wounds. I think about my teacher from primary school and the day I visited him in hospital before the cancer ate up his liver. He had been my favorite teacher. I think about people I do not know. Mostly, I think about you. How I stayed close to you in that photo. How we were two or three when we cheered for those kids who had graduated from Bunny’s Kindergarten. Did you know that after I joined Bunny’s (and you went to Lion’s) we visited a Hindu temple and I bowed before god Shiva? Did you know that after I joined Makini I asked the students if they knew you? I did not remember your first name, so I said,“Tai. Her name is Tai.”

I have a photo of your photo and it sits on my desk. I look at it when I wear red lipstick, and I remember it as I am cutting my birthday cake today. It doesn’t fit into the six by four frame I have bought, so I wedge it next to the bookmark I have not yet addressed to myself. The one that declares, “Be still and know that I am God.” I bought the frame because of the Bible verse lining the edges, infamous make-you-feel-good Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” This is the verse to tell you not to be scared because someone somewhere has your hope and your future. I have already been told that it has been taken out of context, used to pamper dreams that do not match the original intentions. I never quote the verse. I have replacements. Replacements when I think about the context plans and out-of-context plans. The unfinished book. The story that’s taking me one year to write. The “feminist” essay. The memories that only come to me at 1 a.m. The things I can only write after I have cried. This pina colada cake on turning 23. I will give away the photo frame when I graduate. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.[1] Yet I know I will carry the photo of your photo with me, because I think finally this is what they call love: That day when we are two or three, and the ground is a dusty white, and we are thinking about a hope and a future. That day when I don’t create characters or set scenes or paint the sky grey. I am in God’s Great Story. At last, every chapter is better than the one before.[2]


If DEATH my friend and me divide,
thou dost not, Lord my sorrow chide,
or frown my tears to see;
restrained from passionate excess
thou bidst me mourn in calm distress
for them that rest in thee.

I feel a strong immortal hope,
which bears my mournful spirit up
beneath its mountain load;
redeemed from death, and grief, and pain,
I soon shall find my friend again
within the arms of God.

Pass a few fleeting moments more
and death the blessing shall restore
which death has snatched away;
for me thou wilt the summons send,
and give me back my parted friend
in that eternal day.

-Charles Wesley, 1762



The photo of your photo


[1] Joan Didion, Blue Nights
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

We're going to have to cancel plans

You were looking forward to his visit
From the time he eavesdropped on your conversation in the bus to the airport and he told you he wanted nothing more than to visit Kenya
And your heart clutched because you had wanted nothing more than to show him what he wanted nothing more of, you,
The tumbling hills and crevasses where the giants once lived
The green choke of hyacinth on the wide escapes of Lake Victoria
How you would wake up to the morning of a snow peaked mountain
And in the dizzying mist you would toast to your future
Maybe a drive through dry land whet with oil or rivers or a prowling lion
Maybe the dung smell of manure and raw milk from your father’s grazing Fresian cattle
The salty earth, the taste of Bogoria and Nakuru and the Indian Ocean
The pink flamingoes of your childhood
How he would stand by you when the president rolled into Safaricom stadium (because Safaricom owns Kenya) in his green land rover and his swordsman
How in the pelting rain you would enjoy the ecstasy of being one in Kenya and his first taste to the joy of belonging
Then he emails you “I’m sorry we’re going to have to cancel plans. Because of the recent incident in Nairobi, I’m no longer allowed to meet outside my hotel. The US government doesn’t advise me to be here longer than necessary.”
Longer than necessary. We’re going to have to cancel plans. He’s leaving you before he visits you
Before you show him what he had once wanted nothing more of, you.
Before he clings to you and the two of you meet your end in the inevitable explosion of light
The road carnage
The green muddy matatu ambling to Eastleigh to tailor your wedding dress...

We’re going to have to cancel plans.