In the recent weeks, my ink and my unfolding layers of trauma seem to have reestablished a divine connection and my fluency in pain must have triggered something that awakened my procrastinating scribe.
She insists on different things during many of our undocumented fights. Perfection is her major card but the audacity to flip healing attempts to shameful attention-seeking stunts is what I am yet to grasp.
Moving on...
If you have ever dropped by here, you must have collided with me stating my love for Jacarandas and how they bloom from early September through October to early November. That three months capsule has my favourite girl's birthday, her death anniversary, my birthday and my firstborn's birthday.
To me, that season represents life and death.
Rebirth. The beauty in death.
Life lessons about the jump from a womb to a grave.
Tales of a colonised nation rotting in exotic natural leftovers.
The rebirth bit holds a whole lot. Back in the sixties, a woman I am named after gave birth to my late mum on a certain November 12th. She was her fifth child. My mum would later birth me on October 20th just twenty-two days before her 1983 birthday.
Years later I followed suit and my womb's gates opened up on a certain 21st of September for my own.
The death bit is about my favourite girl's exist from this realm to the other. Its beauty is the willingness of the tree to shed her purple merged with the grace of her dying petals.
The reality check is how short life is and how fragile a wrinkle-free skin is. Time consumes years in decades and centuries. Soon enough, we will be dust. Soon enough, we will be replaced by a different generation.
The other is the most obvious one. It is a fact lived by every citizen of this 'sovereign' Republic.
The tales of an exotic blessing left behind by the devastating colonial grip on this country and beyond. The purple bloom dates back to the 1900s when the British settlers were slicing up this fertile land they had just 'discovered' in East Africa.
Forget the carnage they brought, they wanted to live in the Highlands where we say the sun never really penetrates the secrets of the land and so they spiced up their chosen spaces with Jacarandas.
After our freedom fighters chased away their flying bullets with our flying spears and machetes, their footprints can still be traced using these magnificent giants.
This post was inspired by those photos. They belong to one of the people I follow on Twitter. They were all taken in the different locations of our capital with the last frame capturing one of the oldest universities in this country.
wambuku w.
