Dear Father,
Before you receive this letter, I know you must have made up your mind and moved on. You must have considered me dead, buried, lost, and forgotten in a land very far away from you.
Who knows if you erected a grave-like monument as a remembrance of the daughter you once had and who was taken away from you by the cold hands of death and unfortunate fate? If you ever did, I wonder what kind of flowers grow over it now. I am thinking of those climbing ivies, sunflowers, and then the ixoras. I am not ruling out the presence of the hibiscuses surviving to the shame of the overgrown shrubs. I am trying to imagine all of them littered there and probably struggling for a right to grow over the now abandoned site.
I close my eyes.
I allow them to wander the length and breadth of the large compound picking out the familiar tall pine trees, and then other trees, especially that lemon tree that used to stand at the center of the compound before you cut it down, years ago, to provide more space for your exotic cars growing in their numbers, daily then.
My eyes, still closed, could see the amusement park built only for us. I could feel the too much amount of Sandy soil all over the playground that made movement over them herculean but I understand it was for our safety while swinging high and low over those stuffs. The mango tree still stands, in my mind anyway, and is still very close to the wall painted coconut white and barricaded with electric barb wires that meant business and never bluffing.
I close my eyes still.
Images of years ago embrace me in their clusters, images lost and now regained. I conjure memories, I conjure dreams, I conjure you, father!
Now I am tempted to ask that one question that wakes me up daily and sends me to slumber in all these years the tide of a courageous fortune sailed me away and separated from your vicious warmth, never to return it. Do you ever think of me father? Ever did? Ever, still? I wish I know how you remember me now. Do you still have any memorable moments that link me to you as yours do to me? I see your face always, father , I see it still, even now I pen these words. I still have a mental picture of that wary scar on your eyebrow although I am unsure now on which side of the eyebrows it sits.
What about you father? Do you still see my face? What exactly do you remember? My ears itch and I wish I could hear you whisper the answers to me right now.
Father, I know you must have seen me as a curse or a burden, a child not worth of your name, a child you would wish in your next world to trade for a ram, or goat just like you've always threatened you would. It is not your fault father, it is all mine. I know I betrayed you, but I had my reasons and I assume full responsibility for my actions. Your daughter has grown to learn life's sweet-sour lessons and I have learned too, in my years of sojourn, that in whatever boat life tucks you in, heading to whatever shore, you row, father. You just row and row your boat with less worry about the uncertainties that await you on the other side of the shore. You just row and row your boat, father, gently down the stream of life, gently over the thorns of servitude, merrily, merrily, even merrier as you row, aware that this life is just a dream! It fades- light, sound. Music. Action. Then silence and eternal darkness.
So father, while you are still on board, still afloat, you paddle with all your might, all your passion, all your love, you sing and hum some tunes as you ride, aware you may never get the chances to paddle again whenever the boat docks, whenever it pleases the spirits to make it dock!
I accept my fate, those tiny bricks life threw at me in a riotous manner which I had a choice to mould a brick house out of them, a tiny castle, and a little playground, anything else or just let the bricks heap there and walk away. I chose the former, father.
I am not writing to tell you that I am still alive.
This letter may never get to you because I have a feeling that you probably may have sold your house, it's destination. Memories and the emptiness of the entire edifice, memories of all you lost, the good old days that just vanished in the wind, must have tortured you and you decided to put the whole long nights behind you and move. And since I cannot say with certainty where you now reside, the branch of your company you presently oversee, and in what corner of the country it is located, I will duplicate this letter on three parts and send them to your three addresses I used to know. If it is the wil of God, one must get to you, if not, I have no other choice and the spirits will bear me witness that I tried, that I tried to extend an arm, one last time.
Yet, in all of these efforts, father, I prefer you continue to see me as your late daughter, a child you lost years ago to fate.
The reason is simple: I do not know but I have this funny feeling that before this letter would reach you, I might have passed away.
Don't bother finding me; make no effort to save me, father. You cannot, not anymore, nobody alive can! You must know it took months if not years to attain this height of reality, this height of total acceptance and surrender to the whims and caprices of a callous fate.
It is already fated that I will die, on this hospital bed, very far away from you. I have accepted that destiny. I can feel the angel of death in the neighborhood. He is edging closer even as my hand scribbles these words. The eerie feeling here in this hospital, my room, especially confirms my uncanny fears that he is close-by. It is beyond the winter cold and the snowy breeze covering everything in white outside my window. It is my angel drawing near, perhaps, ascending the sloppy road that would connect him to 25 blue ivy, health center, Monaco
I am sure he is coming for no one else but me. Soon, he will locate this hospital painted brown and white. He will likely take his time waiting for the right nod before he ascends the stairs and circles the last of the barricades that will lead him to me.
Father, in a matter of days, the angel will certainly locate my room on the first floor of this two-storeyed building, and, then, he will look out to the far end ignoring the mumurs and the whimpering tears of the fear-stricken patients who are not yet ready and willing to die. Unlike me, they still believe that much is yet to be accomplished; so many more lives are yet to be touched, but I've given up such hope, such longing a long time ago, longer than I can even remember. I now live a life of total resignation to fate and fortune, the propellers of human destiny. I paddle my boat like that carefree and spirited bird my mother once told me about in one of her unending folktales, merrily against the currents and tides, aware the shore is near.
The angel of death, I am sure, will ignore all of those patients heaped at a corner, in their wards and rooms, and continue to the end of the long corridor. He will see me in a deep blue silk snap wrap patient gown underneath an ash colour insulated jacket with worn-out jumbo box braids, waiting for him. Perhaps he might smile or frown but I do not care for any of his gestures. I have nothing against him. I know who I have to settle my grudge with. I will try to put up a shimmering cold smile and I will give my hands willingly. He will lift me gently unto his shoulders, and, in a flash, we shall be flying away beyond the reach of the doctors, nurses, Federal Bureau Intelligence (FBI), Crime Investigation Agency (CIA), and all the world's security organizations put together. They can only look on as I ride on the wings of this angel, the angel of death sent to bring me and unite me with my mother, someday with my brother, you, and the rest of the inhabitants of this earth.
Waiting for this angel is a very safe and torturing experience. You know he is close, yet seems so far away. And to kill time, you see yourself doing lots of unimaginable things that may not count in a whole lifetime all in the name of waiting for the angel of death to keep to your appointment with fate. I pray yours comes without delay whenever it will be your own appointed time, father. So, you will not have to wait for so long as I now do. Every new day and new breath on this bed make me sad and forlorn. The only real breath I've enjoyed for months is this breath with which I write to you.
I can't wait to die, father. That is my only refuge from this world of undeserving regrets. What did I do? Did I choose my fate? I never did! Somewhere in between the boundary of the dead and the living, some elements did, and here I am completing the cycle.
It is useless telling you not to weep for me father. You are very strong willed and that tears will labour all day to even force a single drop out of your eyes. So, telling you not to cry is like instructing the wind to blow even when you are aware that it can't help it more than to do so. I probably do not need anyone's pity. Whatever the tortoise gathets, it carries them alone. This is one of your maxims that have stayed in my heart refusing to fade away.
Father, I am not writing to exonerate my self from all the crimes you obviously charged me guilty of. I am not even sheltering myself from the piles of accusations and names you must have heaped on me in all these years. I am only writing because, this morning, I woke up with unknown happiness in my heart. The happiness was more than I can describe. For once in many months, I feel like living again. For once in many years, I feel like seeing you again, holding you, running into those arms I've always wanted to run to ever since I was a child and even now. I write to purge the feelings held in prison for years.
This morning, I woke up with a new lease of energy. The hospital room did not smell much of ethanol, camphor, methylated spirit, Dettol, and other strange smell that made hospitals one of such places I dreaded in my entire life, everyone does anyway. I don't know where these strange feelings are coming from, maybe from these louvers I feel are slightly open and the cold sneaking in through the tiny opening. From a distance, music is filtering into my ears. It's not the usual popular jazz and pop music. I have heard in all these years; the music that was part of what has popped and jazzed my life away. This one is very soft and unsentimental. I wish I knew the artist. My body is rising in ecstacy and so is my spirit rising with it. I am feeling exactly the way I felt that day I climbed the cycling stairs of Lagos International Airport about to board the Qatar airline knowing that I may never come back to you again.
Now I lift my hands towards the sky, I wish someone is close-by to help connect the tip of my finger to the stars. I am waiting but not even the white doctors or the nurses are in sight. I am lying languidly on my bed. I wanted to join my voice in the song but I ended up whistling a different tune. Can you guess the song I am whistling now , father? You know the song. It is that song you sang those Sunday mornings you navigated your way to the dining table avoiding all contact with anyone in the house. It is that song that sounds more like a funeral song than a war song. I remember the countless number of times I had wished to ask you what you were singing, but I failed. I failed because of those torrential looks in your eyes. It seemed like they are always coated with venoms. Now I whistle the tone. I wish I knew the words, I wish I knew what I sing, the legend, the warrior, the community, clan, and tribe I sing for. Since I know neither the word nor the people I have to give up. Do you know what I did? I converted the tone to a heartrending dirge. You would never believe that I could sing so beautifully, but I did.
It was in between the whistling that I looked near my table and saw a paper and a pen. It seemed someone who knows my suppressed feelings left them there for me to unbind and unchain my thoughts. I did not care who did, but I took them, I took them because they were waving and inviting me. I felt the papers- clean, soft, and empty waiting for me! That was how I decided to write, to unbind my feelings and unchain my thoughts.
I am writing to tell you those things I had stood before you to tell you but fumbled for lack of words because the looks of a tiger on your face could not allow me to speak. Father, if wishes could kill, you would have been dead by now, for many times I had locked myself in my room and wished all the bad things of life to come upon you, but in the morning I asked God to pardon you hoping you would someday turn to me. But you never did, even those days you watched me sail away, you made no effort to stop me. You were too busy to take notice of the plight of your only daughter.
I am writing to purge my heart and ask you for a special favor, the last from a father to a daughter after I am gone and to tell you my own side of the story. I presumed a lot of people who knew nothing about me have told my story for too long. It is time to tell my story, father. I am now that proverbial lioness who has suddenly come of age to tell her own side of the story of the hunt. And I say, to hell with those stupid hunters who have told and embellished my story to suit their purposes for so long!
I know you are a very busy man. You might be in a board meeting when this letter will come to you and you will hear it as you board a plane to a place heaven knows where it is, while struggling to create a time to read it. I promise not to waste your time with this letter which I pledge will be as short as possible.
Today is my birthday. Now I know why I am so happy! I know my cake is on the way and other fine things the love of my life will surely surprise me with. Father, on this sixth day of February, my mother gave birth to me, at exactly 9:00pm at Health Center. Do you still remember father? Today, I am twenty-two!. I am old I guess? Life! I am wasting much time again, bear with me father for now I begin....
Troubled Childhood
My childhood story is certainly not one of those stories you would stick out your money to buy and thrill yourself in it's pages. I have read better stories and encountered people with more pleasurable childhood fascinating enough to make a compelling storybook. Most of the things that happened to me as a child came and went in a rather patterned and regimented manner and I struggled daily to pick out what was the most fascinating part of it all begging for a repeat. That is why I had nothing much to talk about, to write, to share with you. Most of the things I know were stories I heard from my mother, and Daniel those very few times he was in a good mood to play. He was my only brother but I could barely write a page composition about him, then Aunty Margarita whom I refused to forget the taste of her meal. She is still the best cook I'd ever come across in my entire life. In many quiet moments whenever she was done with cooking, she shared her story with me and made me cherish what childhood days were all about. I grabbed a few stories from Noel .Ah! Noel, the one I called a chewing stick. His lanky body supported by a big head marred with tribal marks is part of the memories I treasure, father. Adamu guarded his stomach more than he ever did to our gate. Then, Micheal, the only driver you ever found his driving peaceful, peaceful enough to make you accept his demands and increased his salary just to retain him. I made them tell me their stories and I am eternally grateful to them, for doing so.
Others were stories which the wind was carrying to some far distant places and I waylaid the wind and took some of the stories from her. That always happened in the evenings I spent in the balcony, envying the tiny drops of the drizzling rainfall; marveling at the crystal and often pale colouring of the climate. It was there that I always worshipped the sonorous, but tempting whispering and brisk movement of the wind as she hurriedly passed me by as if in haste to get to her destination.
…And so, father, I begin where the wind left off—those evenings on the balcony, when the drizzle painted the world in watercolor grays and the air carried secrets I was too small to hold. The wind never stayed long; she whispered fragments of other lives, other sorrows, and hurried on. But I kept what she gave me. I kept everything, folded into the corners of my heart like pressed flowers from a grave I hadn't yet dug.
You remember the house, don't you? Not the marble floors or the cars that multiplied like rumors, but the sound of it. The way the generator coughed itself awake at dusk. The way Aunty Ada's pots sang against each other in the kitchen, a metallic lullaby. The way Daniel's laughter cracked open the afternoon like a coconut, spilling sweetness before it hardened into silence. You were rarely there to hear it. You were in boardrooms, in airports, in the hum of engines that took you farther from us than any ocean ever could.
I was eight when I first understood that love could be a currency you hoarded. You'd come home with gifts, dolls with glass eyes, dresses stitched in Paris but your hands never lingered. They passed the packages like relay batons, then retreated to your pockets. I learned to smile with my mouth only. The rest of me stayed guarded, a small country with borders drawn in crayon.
Daniel was different. He taught me to climb the mango tree even after you fenced it with barbed wire and warnings. "The fruit tastes better when it's stolen," he said, wiping juice from my chin with the hem of his school shirt. He was twelve, all elbows and bravado, and he believed the world could be tricked into kindness. I believed him because he was my brother, and brothers are the first gods children worship.
Then came the night the house burned—not with fire, but with words. You found the letters I'd hidden beneath my mattress. Not love letters. Escape letters. Plane tickets. A passport photo where I looked older than my years. You didn't shout. You simply closed the door to your study and left me outside it, a supplicant at a temple that had already changed its gods.
I was sixteen. Old enough to know that daughters are investments, and I had become a depreciating asset.
The next morning, you cut down the lemon tree. I watched from my window as the chainsaw screamed through its trunk, sap bleeding gold onto the driveway. You said it was for the cars. I knew it was for me.
Daniel tried to stop you. He stood between the blade and the bark, arms spread like a crucifix. You didn't hit him—you never hit us—but you looked at him the way men look at obstacles. He left for boarding school the next week. I didn't see him again until the funeral.
Mother's, of course. The one you didn't attend because of a merger in Peru. She died in the guest room, the one with the lavender walls she painted herself. The doctors said aneurysm. I say heartbreak. She'd been rowing her boat alone for years, and the oars finally splintered.
After that, the house shrank. The amusement park rusted. The sandy playground hardened into concrete. Noel stopped telling stories; his facial expression seemed deeper, like scars from a war he'd never fought. Aunty Margarita's pots grew cold. Michael drove away one morning and never came back. Even the wind changed direction.
I left on a Tuesday. Qatar Airways, economy, window seat. I was seventeen and carrying a suitcase full of your silence. At the airport, I looked for you in the crowd the way drowning people look for air. You weren't there. Daniel waved from the departure gate, his eyes already older than mine. "Row, little sister," he whispered. "Row like hell."
I rowed.
Across oceans. Through cities that smelled of cumin and exhaust. I learned languages the way other people learn bruises—quickly, painfully, permanently. I worked in cafés where the coffee was bitter and the tips were worse. I slept in hostels where the walls sweated and the dreams of strangers pressed against my skin. I became a ghost in my own story, haunting the margins.
Then came the diagnosis. Not dramatic, no lightning bolt, no cinematic collapse. Just a doctor in a white coat saying words that sounded like foreign currency: Stage IV. Inoperable. Months, maybe. I laughed. I'd been dying since the lemon tree fell.
The hospital in Monaco was an accident. A fever in a market, a collapse near a church, kind strangers who carried me here. The nurse who hums highlife when she changes my IV, the window that frames a jacaranda tree blooming purple against the harmattan haze, the pen and paper that appeared like manna.
I am twenty-two today. The cake never came, but the love of my life did. He's sitting beside me now, holding my hand the way you never learned to. His name is Chris. He's a poet who sells plantain chips to pay for his verses. He says my scars are constellations. I believe him because he is the first person who has ever looked at me like I am the sky, not the ground beneath it.
Father, this is the favor I ask: See me.
Not the traitor. Not the burden. Not the daughter who traded your name for a one-way ticket. See the girl who memorized the sound of your Sunday dirge and turned it into a love song. See the woman who built a castle from the bricks you threw. See the lioness who learned to roar in whispers.
If you've sold the house, good. Let the new owners plant a lemon tree where the old one stood. Let them fill the playground with children who don't know the taste of barbed wire. Let the wind carry new stories.
If this letter finds you in a boardroom, put down your pen. If you're on a plane, close your eyes. If you're alone, truly alone, read this aloud. Let my voice fill the spaces your silence left.
I forgive you. Not because you deserve it, but because I do. Forgiveness is the last luxury of the dying, and I am rich with it.
Tell Daniel I kept his mango seed. It's in a pot on my windowsill, sprouting defiant green against the hospital white. Tell him I rowed. Tell him the shore was beautiful.
And when your own angel comes because he will, father, he keeps appointments, don't wait like I did. Don't count breaths like misers count coins. Sing your dirge loud enough for the stars to hear. Let it be a war song this time.
I'm tired now. The pen grows heavy, but my heart is light. Chris is humming the tune you used to sing. I know the words now. They're simple:
Row, child. Row.
The river is wide, but the boat is yours.
The shore is near, and the water remembers your name.
I love you. I always did. Even when I hated you, I loved you. That's the curse and the gift of daughters.
The angel is here. I can smell the jacaranda on his wings.
Goodbye, father.
Thank you for the boat.
Your daughter,
Always.