I thought we said we weren't going to think about this any longer. Think instead on this soft grey sky and the insistent orange light as it falls into your room, onto your ceiling. By the window - you look there as your family scurry outside your open door. There are no secrets here, your parents think as they pass; no secrets here, your sisters think. No secrets here. None but your orange ceiling that lights your sacred Sunday morn.
I'm bent behind my door changing, and she bustles into my room nearly knocking me down, an instruction to Tami still flying from her lips. I'm writing a story about our family. I can't find her black cardigan, so she plucks a polka dotted one from the pile in the Ghana-must-go at the end of my bed. Those aren't my clothes by the way. Most of the clothes that are kept in this room have not been my clothes since I moved into my university halls.
Did we win the lottery, Timi asks. I don't know, I haven't checked my ticket yet. Oh. She wanders back into the windowless corridor in search of the command mummy had given her several times already. She was the youngest until Dami arrived unexpectedly on the scanner nearly five years ago. And now she's nine years old, quickly turning older and wise.
Morning dada. Good morning my dearest first born, could you press replay please. I want to play this song you've never heard before. Onto You by Bob Fitts. We have heard it countless times before.
Do you want to be an author, Tami asks. I wander from the kitchen back into the living room and, No, I just want to write a story.
Don't use your sleeve! How many times have I told you? She's wrestling with Dami, the youngest, between her legs, struggling to comb her soft little afro as she has struggled to do for the past few months. It doesn't hurt. It does. Stop moving, it doesn't hurt. Bow your head, I'm almost done.
I'm sitting with my phone, having become almost undetectable amidst this busy stream of loudness and life. I haven't been home for a while and life has carried on growing in this place, without me. But I am not sad to see it this way. Not when we will always have our Sunday mornings.
Our family has been forced into an intimacy that I would never think to surrender for any cause on earth.
written: London house no. 5 of 7,
Sunday the 21st of February, 2016
