He calls me Jero

He starts calling me “Jero” right from the start
I tell him my name is Miriam Jerotich and I emphasize the “J” the way I like to 

so that no one misspells it. But he still pronounces it the right way:

The “J” melts into a “Ch” and I become “Cherotich” and then “Jero”.
And when he calls me Jero it sounds almost like the way Tai used to call me,
“Chero”
When he asks where I’m from the anger doesn’t burn in me like it did at 

Malindi Airport when the security guard asked me where I come from, the way 

Kenyans ask you where you come from so that they fit you onto their 

ethnic map
It doesn’t hurt when I tell him where shags is
It doesn’t hurt when I let him call me Jero.

Sometimes,
it’s okay to break the rules.

The Dance

When you come the horns blare and the dust scales the air thick with the perfumed harbinger of your dance

You come sheltered in the cocoon of shadows

Your feet floating on the savannah coloured grass

You are the kid that I carried in my arms in the goat pen as it bleated for the milk of the mother whom we slaughtered that night

You come now dancing covered in that goatskin that we left in Baghdad when

the bullets killed the last of your kin

Your back bent 

Your knees keeling

choking the life out of the grass 

Your spirit resurrecting as I clap to the tune of your dirge

One- two- one-two

What happens when we forget the names of the dead?

When we call the living by the names of those who are gone?

Do we acknowledge that the living exist?

Are they only alive because of those who are gone?

Are those gone only remembered through the life of the living?

Do they retain the lives that they lived before the living came along?

What happens when we call the living the names of the dead, in love?

When we remember their own names yet insist on calling them by the departed?

Is it that we see them like I see you now?

Do I bury you again when I remember you like this:

Dancing around me,

within me.

A spirit in the robe of the goat that we slaughtered that night in Baghdad

Like I remember you in my own memories because I have forgotten you too and 

I am now calling the living by the names of those who are gone?

#CantSayGoodbye

It’s one of those nights that I stay awake past 1 a.m. Not because I am expecting a call from you but because my heart is aching. The kind of nights when tears will come to my eyes and I will realize that the answer will be to write, and I will write a stream of words and sounds, the balm for my heart, the price for not journaling enough or not writing at all and realizing that the pain of not connecting with you is a night when I stay awake past 1 am with a heart that’s beating too fast and a runny nose and tears that weld dark mascara lines down my face.

They lied when they said we never say goodbye. Because we do, everyday, like the blue flame of a dying gas burner. The moments when we are not breathing the same air, and I am remembering how right now I would be trying to sleep over in your apartment instead of going back to my own room, moments when I wish that I were fighting sleep so that we could stay up till 1 am, together. The coffee talks when we drank tea instead and you asked me, “How was your week? How can I be praying for you?” It’s the night when I realize that living out this 'goodbye' is a process that one holiday will not complete. I will not realize that I am performing goodbye when I am finally stepping out of the house, and a new life comes to me unbidden, crystallizing in your place, black and white faces in a new congregation, old old friends. Why is my heart aching, then? Why do I feel like I’m tearing you out of my heart so that I can make a place for them? Why do I think before I speak like I am striking out the thoughts that coursed through me when I was still with you?

This is not heartbreak because it was never love. It was life. It was too many its, too much for words to fathom into meaning. So it comes like too many sentences that mean #cantsaygoodbye #imissyou #ILoveYou. Like an aching heart and a night when sleep won’t come.  

Dedicated to my Dartmouth family. I miss you my friends. #livingoutagoodbyefrompeopleyoulovesomuchishard

The Stories I Tell about Myself

We lunge back to those memories one day and begin to trace connections about our lives. We see the recurring themes and tropes, the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, the stories we tell others about ourselves. They become such an inherent part of us that the stories become a life unto themselves, till we can’t recognize the stories we tell about ourselves. We don’t realize until we have told it enough times and it hits us that we are saying the same thing over and over again, feeling the same emotions, pursuing different dreams with the same motives, that the doorways keep opening through the stories we cannot stop telling about ourselves. And our lives becomes projects that stretch across decades, processes of investigating more about the stories we tell about ourselves, the facts, the evidence, the theories. We seek to understand the stories so that we can understand ourselves, comprehend your humanity. Our purpose for living.

I have two stories that I tell about myself. The first is the story of my mother, the second the story of Kenya's 2007/2008 post-election violence. When I look back at my college career, how it began and ended, I see how the stories I tell about myself carried me through. In these stories my life became encapsulated in a way that I do not yet fully comprehend, that I only slowly discover as each year folds away.

When I tell of my mother I tell of the courage that she has taught me. You must remember that I grew up with my mother, so I took it for granted that women could do anything. I say that she taught us English by reading the Bible with us every morning. I tell of how I cried when she travelled to Kisumu - I was just a few months old and longed for the warmth of her bosom. I tell of how I am like her, because I can out-speak everyone but she’s the only one who can out-speak me. Mostly though, I say of how she ran away from being circumcised, how she gave up the traditions and mysteries and belonging that would come out of that because she yearned for something more, a future that she could not yet see, a dream beyond the valley she was born into.

When I speak of the post-election violence, I tell of the fracture of ethnic identities. The shapes of the violence feel like blocks in my head, a myriad colors that I do not fully understand, why I would hurt so much from something I never directly experienced, why I feel it to the core of my soul, why identity matters so much and I begin to notice the little ways that we set up boundaries between us and them, between me and you. It becomes a question that keeps me up at night, and when I write research papers in college, I draw from the shapes and colors and begin to explore the webs of meaning, the clouded confusion. I want to make it all black and white, to say, “This is the way you should live,” and yet the more I search the less I find. It becomes like water slipping through my hands.

We tell stories about ourselves because we are searching for meaning in our lives. And we recount them because we are seeking for purpose.

I have two stories that I tell about myself. But greatest story I want to tell about myself is the story about You, this unchanging love that I am still comprehending. This overwhelming sense that I cannot bear to fear for the future if the story will end the way it started. With You. When You formed me in my mother’s womb, when I will see You after I have finished telling the stories that I tell about myself. I want Your story to be the best story I could ever tell, the way that the ache in my heart dissolves because I have One in whom I can place my trust. I want to tell the story of how You loved us so much that You let Your Own Son redeem us, how He died a shameful death and even in that promised to never leave us alone. 

I want Your story to be my story.