Leticia's Diary: This is love

Leticia's Diary: This is love: Treat me like a strand of beads and throw me away. One for your ego, one for your wounds, one for you insecurities, and a few for the pa...

This is love

Treat me like a strand of beads and throw me away. One for your ego, one for your wounds, one for you insecurities, and a few for the parts of you that you cannot find, even in me.  This is love. This is how we love. To us love is the thing that owes us justice, owes us peace and must be crucified for all the tears we shed. The things we wanted and never got from all those whom love was meant to pour from like honey. Only honey doesn’t always flow out of rocks. So here we are. Love hunters convinced that love is the one nectar someone somewhere is supposed to hand to us so that the sun shines every day and the moon knows our name.

But love is the strand of beads: easy to break easy to lose, easy to recreate. No bead settles in the same place on the strand it was placed. No moment is the same in love. Love is the hot and cold, high and low, rock and water state and essence of man kind. It splits you up and builds you up and owes you nothing and everything. So treat me like a strand of beads. Treat me like it. Take me apart one by one, lose me here and lose =me there. Find me when you need me forget me for a while. Count me and bunch me up make me feel. This is love.

Gosh what is love? Giving up what you want most. Never uttering what could get you heard most. So much nonsense and so much substance all at once. No one no one created love. No wonder no one defines love. It’s a scream in your soul, the dance of your spirit. Flying without wings. Drowning under rocks. Definitely a strand of beads: together yet apart. This is love

 

A strand of beads I will be a strand of beads  every colour in your hands, cracking and collecting and jingling and maybe torn....falling...apart . Yes love can do that. And love tells you that falling apart does not stop you from being a strand of beads. who you are. You can be a million pieces, a thousand apologies, twenty sides of a thing and love will make you twenty million sides,  the same love, that shows you who you are and tells you what you are. A strand of beads, one for peace, one for forgiveness, one for space, one for respect, one for understanding, one for another, one for hope and the rest for knowing that love cannot be held. This is love

Running away

I’m running away. I don’t know if the destination will be deeper into me or to another place. But either way. I am leaving this place. Visions come, softly and warmly. Of Lisbon in my early teens, a guitar, a plane…no…an airport. And the taste of Lindt chocolate. The knowledge I have of Swiss bank accounts It’s a whirlwind, a maddening concoction of was and should be. So I am running away. I am taking my bag, my baby and I and getting as far from here as possible. To something more me. A newness and fullness. A great escape.

He will love it, join merchant ships and know the feel of Egyptian cotton and Arabian silks. He will know the scent of the finest perfumes and the feel of cockpit levers. I am going.

And when I am asked in the middle of the night why I am doing what I am doing I am going to say love made me do it. Love for myself, love lost, love sought, love. Running towards, running from. Love.

But I am going. To see what I long to see and feel what I long to feel. To be more than what I am have been. Maybe I will write for our meals, or dance for them. I’m not too old, 28, I’ll tone down, loosen up and become 18 again. And him, my darling my son will be my brother. Something he already is. A rule maker on when I can leave and why I should stay. Keeping watch over my bed and how he is dressed. At times even how I am dressed. Hmm all of almost three. My friend my companion. He has to see me play the guitar. He has to see the sea and the world when one is up in the sky.

I am doing it for him.

For living’s sake and heaven’s sake.

Either way I am leaving. How else do I show him who I am , what I am . Why and how he means the world to me. Where do I start showing him the glory? The magic, the sweetness that is this earth. How do I avoid boxing him in and losing his soul to lack? To limit?

No, I have to leave. And either go deeper inside of me to do so or search on this earth for a place that will have me and not try to enter my skin and toes

Leticia's Diary: AFRICAN MAN

Leticia's Diary: AFRICAN MAN: I love you African brother. Trudging along on your mother soil trying to make it to the other side before the sun goes down. Chasing that...

AFRICAN MAN

I love you African brother. Trudging along on your mother soil trying to make it to the other side before the sun goes down. Chasing that dream, chasing that name, chasing that paper. I love you and feel for you. They don’t get it you see. When the cops come calling on your name trying to put some breaks on your new found route, they think it's because you are not right in the head, or out to make them look bad. Their own pockets heavy with the need to make the rich feel protected, they come taking it out on you because they understand your moves but cannot even attempt to relate. Their jobs will be on the line. Their own struggle jeopardized.

They look at you when you visit office to office trying to do an honest day's work, they laugh at you when you speak of the podium you are soon going to hold, they talk you down when you are on top. I feel for you. I understand you.

And when a kid comes along in your pursuit of Mrs. Right. They don’t give you chance to get ready. Tearing you down before you even make an attempt or even realize that you are a father. But I have to push that aside incase I defend your truly useless counterparts. In this piece I am giving you my respect because I have seen your feet in the dust and your mud crusted shoes. I have seen how you cant sleep at night trying to connect the voice in your heart to the reality on the ground.

The marks you have left on the floor from up and down walks as if practicing the next days labour. Of driving that taxi of all sorts around town, some even on credit so you can get out of the house again with the confidence that there is something on the table. Or bearing that boss’s grouchy voice when he talks down at you like you are not a man with dreams and even more potential at doing his job than he has.

I just feel for you. That’s all. Holding a strong front when she shouts you down or kills your kid. Keeping a brave face because someone has to be a pillar. Keep it all form crumbling.

At times they think you don’t think, you don’t see, you have no feelings…you are not meant to understand. I feel for you. I have seen you in my son. All of three and wont cry incase they see him do it.

Oh there are some times when he just breaks down and cant stop. But many times he makes sure mommy isn’t crying, that mommy is smiling and that no one is going to see that he is sick to the bone. That is you my African man. So filled with a force no one will ever measure. You do indeed belong on the pulpit. You are indeed more capable of turning many hearts around. Because no one understands life like an African man.

I mean how do you feel when they sexualize you. Format you as a rapist. How do you feel when they lable you forcing you to be less. How do you feel? Do you have any close friends? True friends? Have you seen happiness? What do you really want when you have an hour’s free time? How understood are you African man?

Who has seen real pain, who has been so tired he cant breathe, who has sweated so hard only to note that the wall hasn’t moved a single inch and yet is expected to work much harder, all the while pretending it’s ok, carrying six people on his back, looking at his shelved dreams every night because that is all he can do if he is to be a man. And yes, being a man.

A man that makes sure there is comfort at home, respect in his enemies’ eyes, understanding in his mother’s eyes and no shame on his father’s grave.

Oh African man! All the credentials, all the organs, all the brain cells, all that innocence. Yet painted black. Hmmm.

How can I. An African woman, not have any respect for that? How can I not love you and just wish to let you know that when I scream it is because your wall wont let me in. Your inability to cry scares me and I too have my own to carry. Sooo much to carry. But ohh African man. I see you. I see you.

Lucky people!!!

SO you move right? In this sea of mammals. Somehow still locked to mommy and daddy and what they did and what they didn’t do and yet being forced by those very same people to go out and conquare the world with your entire being. So what do you do? Well if you are lucky...you will cut the ambilical cords. If you are unlucky, you will never truly understand what they want and will waste away doing goodness knows what to yourself. And if you are half clued in, you will get a Masters, heck a PhD and marry at a good age and stay there.

I like to think that the best ones are the lucky ones but alas not everyone is lucky. Lucky goes to ten per cent of human beings that were born to just seem like they don’t care, don’t belong and wont make it. The ten percent that everyone ends up wanting to be like. Steven Jobs, Richard Branson, Michelle Obama, Albert Einstein..you name it.

It doesn’t mean if you are reckless and lost someone will envy you. But it means that if you have pulled away from the norm, fallen, made some mistakes and never ever let too many people see you cry about it. You might just make it. Because you are the lucky one that doesn’t have to please everyone including yourself but are still able to be true. Strangely meeting the needs of millions because you just could not be contained.

I hope to heaven that those who know they are lucky, will all get to the region of luckiness. It seems to me that not many agree that lucky people make it. And that many think a true sign of luckiness is for even a snail in a remote village to be able to be trumpled by a pair of Nike or a dropped ipad. But that’s not true. The truth I know is that the lucky people are simply the ones that are not hating others for their success because they know they have their own share somewhere. The lucky people are those who have dropped bellow sea level and still managed to float. The lucky people live life as it is without blaming where they come from, what they’ve done and without really giving a damn what others are doing.

People the world over find this kind of behaviour strange. And in fact life itself fights it pretty damn hard. And I guess that is why lucky people are also highly aware of a higher power. Someone out there that knew that that bunji jump should have killed you but didn’t let it happen. Someone out there that knows you are way out of line but turns it to your advantage by squeezing the wisdom out of it into your heart.

Either way the lucky people, mavericks and such…I like to think I am one of them. I like to think I know a few of them and I just pray to God that if at least we don’t all get to board some rocket ship we still get to make a mark unlike any other. Because that’s what lucky people do you see. They do induplicable things. That anyone following can only simply ruin it. I guess that is why lucky people have absolutely no regrets. Happy November Otuli!!!

FORGET IT!

I’m getting the hang of it…this taking responsibility for my actions et cetera, et cetera. Its the least I can do. When you are 28 and starting to think that you have laid waste all the days of your life, you tend to have moments that are not so sweet on you. I never thought there would come a day when I loathed feeling sorry for myself and had no time to hear my own whining. But it is here.

I am learning and embracing the fact that everything that has happened to me and may be about to happen is a result of my own actions good or bad. And no matter how someone is treating me, I have the responsibility to react in a way that will not have me crying my eyes out for days. It does not matter what anyone has done to me in this lifetime. What have I done to me? What have I let myself do, become and see to get me here?

No one stood against the exam paper door so that I could not break the codes, no one barred the university gate. No one told me to act like I was above my own father and no one said sex had no consequences. No one. I believed what I believed, did what I did and in everything I do or believe there-in lays my prize.

It is high time this happened to me. High time I started to see that life is not in the clouds but on this solid ground. What I want is not what I will always get unless I let it become so in its own time. Enough of blaming the moonlight for the tide, enough of saying the sea is too wide. I am alive to prove every thing wrong and my life right.

I am alive for a reason and a purpose and I am responsible for those. It doesn't matter what happens, happened or is happening en route to that place. My reaction, my ability to learn and change accordingly is what matters. Each little thing comes to teach us a lesson. To show us who we are and what we are going to lose if we continue acting a certain way.

Don’t go around blaming someone for causing your death, anger or regret. You do things that give you what you get. You made friends with that not very nice person, do you blame them for taking your man? You let your fantasies cloud reality are you shocked to be left in soaking hard mud?

Forget your sob stories about how no one ever listened to you or cared about you or met your wants. We get what we give.

Cry me a river over the child you denied life, cry me an ocean over the one that is alive. Tell me how its Bobby that wont meet his end of the deal but Bobby isn’t the rest of your life. He may have been love and passions fulfilled. But success, health, maturity, joy, peace, responsibility and motherhood all those lay in your court.

Don’t come to me feeling sorry for you. Come tell me what you do not like about yourself and why you think certain things are not working as well as you thought they might and I will see what I can do. For I have learned it is better to be hard on yourself than to cry over what you think are Jake’s mistakes. Did he tell u he doesn’t like who he is? Do you honestly think your tears and complaint can change an entire human being? An entire destiny? Really?

Then how come you are drowning in your own lake?