Song For Night

This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light.

Something in the way she stands reminds me of myself, always searching for something.

I am thoroughly confused, but my desire—which is larger than my need to find my platoon, yet wrapped into it—is relentless in propelling me forward.

I am mostly moving from one scene of past trauma to another, the distances between them, though vast, have collapsed to the span of a thought

the joy is the same and requires only the complete focus on the moment, on the act.

no amount of horror seems to have inured me to my own pain, or fear, or hunger, or desire.

even if water won’t wash me clean, hope might.

“The conflict is never in the truth, only in how we receive it.”

These were the people who murdered my father, people from Sabon Gari. People he’d probably lent money to. People who hated him as much as I do because in the end, I know now, we always hate the saintly, the kind. Not because they are kind, no, God knows we need that, but because their kindness makes us recognize the shits that we are.

Every star is a soul, every soul is a destiny meant to be lived out.