Yesterday I got through the whole of Disc 2 of the Hamilton original Broadway track while doing chores around the house. Tonight, I finally finished ‘Avatar: Fire & Ash.’ As a deeply reflective and analytical person, consuming these different forms of storytelling media tends to be an emotionally immersive experience for me. I reflect on the human condition, compare patterns with those I have also observed in real life, rationalise each character’s way of being to the point where, for a few moments, I am them. Maybe that is also a side effect of being naturally inclined to the social sciences. But after finishing the Avatar film and perusing TikTok for some related edits, I find that my throat catches and tears stream down my face anytime I come across an edit of Neteyam’s death and the impact on the remaining family. Why am I so moved? He is just a character in a film.

Angelica’s narrative of Hamilton & Eliza’s unimaginable grief in ‘It’s Quiet Uptown’ and Burr’s devastating voice crack as he thinks of his daughter in ‘The World Was Wide Enough’ caused my heart to stir and tears to well up in my eyes as if on cue. Why am I so moved? This is no longer my usual empathy — what is being processed and evoked in my mind so as to leave me downcast? I grieve with the characters because something in me is grieving that I have not allowed to fully come out.

For the past few months I have been sad but have learnt to move through it because that is what life demands of you. However, exactly a week ago today I had a miraculous heart shift and began to be intentional with my days again, let God in fully, learnt to talk to Him freely and praying and worship has just felt so natural. It is as though I am finally understanding what a life lived WITH God can actually feel like. Life feels easy and light when shared with Jesus and not struggled through alone. But tonight the sadness has returned and this will have been the first time that I am taking the time to analyse its deeper cause, something I would have much rather avoided. What I am grieving is the end of a life as I knew it.

The Stargirl I have known since she was a little girl has always been bright and so has worked tirelessly, applying herself and her talents and reaching newer heights each time and yet is never quite fulfilled. I have related to Hamilton in the sense that it has always felt like I am running a race with no clear direction, the uncertainty both oppressing me and fuelling me. In other words, I have always strived and when it is rewarded with titles and dedications and positions they are nice but the feeling is always so short-lived as with these positions more work comes: sustaining, striving, moving, getting to the next peak and then the next but I am just not satisfied. Will I ever be? I certainly know that life is not meant to be an endless pursuit otherwise it would be so meaningless and yet that is exactly what life has felt like a lot of the time for me.

From the outside looking in, someone would point to me and say that girl has chased everything she has ever wanted and gotten it. But the raison d’être behind the trophies, achievements, titles and positions is I just want to be seen. Not for what I can do and the level I can perform at, but just me as I am being enough. I want to experience the profundity of love this my Bible speaks about but I have always found slightly difficult to visualise.

And Jake Sully’s family in Avatar are really just a bunch of actors in motion detecting equipment and yet the love, the grief, the sacrifice, the misunderstanding that love covers and accounts for that they manage to pour into their characters…it sincerely takes my breath away. Furthermore, the absolute genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda in being able to document such complex and arresting emotions of ambition, fear, trauma, love and striving has succeeded in striking my heart.

I have been blessed in this life with things I am eternally grateful for. My family loves me deeply and yet for circumstances, perhaps largely outside any of our control, I have always felt misunderstood. Eldest child. Eldest daughter. Eldest granddaughter. With all my achievements, I am a Nigerian family’s dream.

My mother is one of the most amazing women I have ever known, she works so hard and sacrifices every day but it means she comes back home tired. So the conversations I snatch before she retires to bed leave me wishing I could spend more time with her; that God would continue to ease her burden so she can do life with us and not just for us. My brother is more withdrawn, more like a typical teenage boy so he does not share my emotional whims and talkative nature so while we may be in close proximity, it is a quieter more implicit bond that is harder for me (with my own personality type) to adapt to having fully returned from uni. I do not live with my father and in recent years we have gotten closer but I sometimes think of all those years he was not there to see and my inability to even write about it let alone talk about it. My grandmother is probably the family member who knows more about how I think and arrive to conclusions. She shares my talkative nature and fills me up with stories of times past that I want to store and keep forever and ever. However, she lives abroad so I do not get to experience this every day. I write all this to say that while I am surrounded by love in their various forms, I have always felt alone and been used to operating as such. I push people out when I can see they are trying too hard to un-layer a part of me I am not ready to have out. So, God first became my best friend when in my loneliness He showed He has always been there.

But as I mentioned earlier, I can tell that as I have closed the chapter on undergrad student life and started to mature into early adulthood, my deep unsatisfaction can no longer be ignored or pushed deep down. I struggle to let people in. I don’t know how to reveal myself beyond what I have allowed to reach the surface and the people I yearn to do it most with, I fear have become so accustomed to our dynamics that my growing pains just may have no outlet. I am different but the world around me expects me to be the same: go to work, strive some more, apply yourself in all that you do, make your family proud and reach the peak of your external ‘purpose.’ The cycle repeats itself all while deep inside I know it is not what I want.

So why the sadness? Why am I so moved? I know that I have changed but the environment around me has not yet caught up to it. I feel God helping me to start moving the needle — in my family, in my purpose, in my sense of self. But God, this mantle is heavy. Plus, it’s kind of triggering for me too; I am so tired of being the one who always leads, sets the tone, who is independent, strong, reliable. And the problem is I don’t know any other way to be. That’s the version everyone knows me to be, it’s the version I have always known myself to be, so how do I evolve into this new person that clearly my inner man is pulling me toward? I want to be free in mind, in spirit, in truth. I don’t just want to know the fact that I am loved and see its evidences, I want love to be the fact of my being.

I look back at how far Stargirl has come in the last 21 years of life despite having these sentiments locked within her and I am so in awe at the strength and tenacity of my character. I have overcome everything that should have finished me and for that I thank my Lord. But He has opened a new set of eyes within me to know that the way I was doing things before, running on empty, can no longer continue. I am gifted yes and God will take me far but the meaningful things I really want in life, that which answers to my soul as deep calls to deep, I cannot strive to get them. And I know this because things that ordinarily should have excited me (new job, new opportunities ) actually fill me with fearful dread.

Writing is my outlet, it is my God-given gift and if I did not have it I do not know how I would speak and make myself seen. That is probably one of the reasons I am so enamoured with good storytelling, it speaks to the part of me that only comes out when I have a pen and a paper (or in this case, a computer and a mouse). I plan to rewatch Hamilton soon as well as the first two Avatar films. Maybe this time, I won’t cry as much :)

^{September 12, 1967.}

This is so stupid, I thought, absentmindedly tugging at the loose hair that had worked its way free from my braid. It was just past midnight and I’d been pacing the third court for what must have been the fourteenth time.

“I will collect my earrings back from that girl, Rebecca. Nonsense. Hair that was just braided yesterday and it’s already unravelling. Rubbish,” I muttered to nobody in particular. The night before, I had bribed Rebecca, my roommate, with my favourite pair of earrings to braid my hair with thread. I had not told her the reason why I was so keen to get it done – not even after she had repeatedly interrogated me about abandoning my usual cornrows. I had snapped at her, warning that this her over sabi was getting too much. Eh-hehn, is that reason enough to not do this hair properly?

Kissing my teeth in frustration, I squinted through the dark, trying to make out the hands on the convent’s bell tower clock.

12:17. He was late.

Another minute that felt like an hour trailed past. In a few hours time, the Sisters would be lighting the convent candles and preparing us girls for morning mass. Where was he?

12:30.

I let out a deflated sigh and quickly turned on my heel. Heading back toward my dormitory, I was already rehearsing the lines for our inevitable argument, when a panicked voice hissed out from behind me:

“Chichi! Where are you going?”

Bewildered, I spun round and saw Kayode, halfway up the main gate, his satchel snagged on one of the spires. He was still in his black and red striped uniform, his tie gone slack and sweat glistening on his caramel forehead like a glow stick. He is beautiful, I thought, instantly annoyed that that was the first thing that came to my mind after he had left me waiting for half an hour.

“Would you keep your voice down!,” I half whispered, half shouted, hurrying toward him, “If you like, take microphone and announce to the whole school that you’re here.”

“Technically,” he whispered back, “you’re the one trying to sneak a boy into a nunnery. I feel like we should acknowledge who the scandalous one is here.”

I stuck my tongue out at him and yanked the strap of his satchel loose from the spire. Up close now, I could see his singlet through his drenched shirt and realised he had actually run the whole way. I shook my head in amusement, still faintly disbelieving that this daft boy had been a total stranger to me just over a month ago. I remembered the morning he had first turned up at the school gate – the mailman’s apprentice – delivering a sack full of letters postmarked from just before the war started. Since then, I had spent almost every other night searching the school grounds for new entrances and exits to smuggle him in and out of. Suddenly self-conscious of my own appearance, I smoothed a hand over my braids before glaring back up at him.

“I said the side gate. Not the main one. It’s like you want me to get caught”.

He flashed me his usual charming grin and, as if on cue, whatever irritation I had been holding onto gave up and left. Gripping the metal bars, Kayode made one last attempt to haul himself over before flopping back down in an undignified heap on the other side. Biting back laughter, I managed to choke out, “Just stay there. I’m coming round”

“New look I see?” Kayode giggled, gliding his fingers through my hair until they rested around the nape of my neck. Ignoring his question, I studied the small scatter of beauty marks dotted across his nose, cheekbones and chin before settling on his twinkling dark eyes, framed by the thick curl of his lashes.

“I am telling you, you have some Nubian ancestry somewhere,” I said, tracing an imaginary line between the marks on his face, like dots on a map. “Shebi you said your mother is from obodo oyinbo?”

Rolling his eyes sarcastically, he caught my finger mid-trace and corrected that his mother was half Lebanese. “Besides, I am just as Nigerian as you,” he said with finality before pretending to bite my finger off. I smiled sadly before gently pulling away from him.

Looking over my shoulder, my fingers returned to the loose hair from my braid, every tug betraying my quiet anxiety. I could feel Kayode calmly watching me, making room for me to complete this nervous ritual of scanning our surroundings before I allowed myself to speak freely.

We were stood a little way off from the school, on a grassy plain with gentle hills rising and falling in the distance. Kayode’s satchel had been carelessly strewn to the side while his blazer was draped over my shoulders, protecting me from the midnight chill. Birds and insects melodically buzzed and chirruped all around us in what seemed like a love call between the sky and the earth. It was a gorgeous night. Still avoiding Kayode’s gaze, I stared into the starry host above and eventually asked “What does being Nigerian even mean?”

“Are you asking me or God?”

Smartass.

My eyes finally met his and I briefly caught the stars reflected in his irises dancing with inquisition.

“You are Yoruba. I am Igbo. You chose to meet with me tonight. Quite frankly, you’ve been choosing to ignore every caution just so you can be here with me. But I am not your own and you are not mine. Did either of us really choose to be Nigerian? What even is Nigeria anymore?” I said with a look of exasperation.

Kayode stopped smiling. He could tell this was no longer just about him. Great, I had killed the mood as I always did. Nothing I was not used to.

Preparing to train my attention back onto the sky, to my surprise, Kayode pulled me close again, sliding the blazer off my shoulders before laying it flat on the grass. Pointing to it, he said, “Let’s talk. My office hours are midnight till dawn; I guess I could squeeze you in.”

Smirking, I took his cue and sat cross-legged while he stretched out his long, lean frame in front of me, his chin propped up by his hands. I scoffed, slightly embarrassed by the gesture and my growing attraction toward him.

“What are you, a psychiatrist now?” I teased, plucking out a blade of grass and stroking it against his chin.

“Don’t change the subject Chi. I know this has been on your mind, I can take it.”

“Fine,” I replied coolly, “it’s my brother. Sister Nancy heard from one of the guys at the radio station that he’s been spotted at the barracks. Chidi is fifteen, Kayode. Fifteen. What business does he have at the barracks?”

That nagging pull seized my chest again, a little tighter than usual, as I remembered the last time I saw my brother heading out the door of our family home. I could not accept that that might have been the last time I would see him. So I pushed the memory down, deep down to fester with the others, and continued:

“This war is totally unbalanced. I sound like a broken record but you and I both know it. It is a brutish and senseless thing. In Biafra we are outnumbered, outgunned and almost certainly we will be out-fed too. I mean…is he high? Chidi has never even seen a gun in his life. I just…I mean…we used to talk about this stuff. We would sit by father’s radio and Chidi himself would chime in to father and uncle’s debates, saying that our ‘soldiers’ are children pulled from their beds to face an army unequivocally backed by the British. Why would he be at the barracks!” I almost yelled, abruptly stopping myself, ashamed that I had said too much too soon.

Kayode did not say anything at first. Instead, he reached over to silently wipe the tears from my cheek and took my trembling hand in his. He moved his thumb back and forth across my palm in circular motions, unhurried, like this was not the most bizarre arrangement between him and I.

Shame burned within me but it was as though my mouth was a faucet, torrential streams of built up anger and hurt came pouring forth without my consent:

“Chidiebere is fighting in a war that will surely kill him. General Go’s1 government determines who sows, who reaps and who eats. Who lives and who dies. My father’s body is proof of that. I replay the night of his murder again and again and again in my dreams. So I come out here with you, too scared to fall asleep. My mother sent me here to protect me but Kayode, for how long? I can no longer satiate myself on flag waving nor stomach anymore talk of nationhood and glory. Aren’t you just tired?”

I let the tears flow freely now, staring down at the stripes on Kayode’s blazer beneath me.

The birds had stopped singing. I did not need to look up to know that Kayode was turning my words over carefully in his mind, rolling them until they were smooth.

“Chichi…”

“Hey…I told you to stop calling me that,” I managed to joke half-heartedly.

“Okay, Chizaram. You know that you are my answered prayer. I will not pretend to understand what it is like to have all my links to family destroyed. And I cannot imagine your mental torture and isolation for weeks in a nunnery with nothing but your anxiety of what goes on in Biafra. The pain you feel is unimaginable and I will not diminish it. Am I not tired you ask? I mean, you said it yourself earlier: I am Yoruba but my people will always see me as oyinbo, ‘half-caste’, condemned to inhabit no comfortable sense of home. I promise, I am not your enemy. You asked what Nigeria even is?” He reached over and pressed a finger lightly on my chest, just by my heart, before bringing it back to rest against his own. “You and I are the answer Chi.”

“You are an eastern girl and yet here you are talking to me, a western boy. On paper, you and I should be enemies. We should be dying for those dreams of glory, legacy, nationhood. We should be ripping each other apart, demanding that your people give mine what is owed or insisting that my people stole what was always yours.”

Kayode adjusted himself onto his back, now his turn to gaze at the starry sky.

“Chichi…the minute you decided you were something more than a political gambit, more than a blot on a map with borders carved up by some racist Englishmen long ago, you decided who and not what Nigeria really is. I know you think I keep my head in the clouds for too long, but to be alive at a time like this – it is the only way you live and not just survive. Plus, you have far more strength than you know. If it took a war for me to meet someone as extraordinary as you, then that must count for something.”

Breathless at the sincerity of his words, I was stunned once again that this mad boy had found his way into my life. In an effort to distract from the loud thumping of my heart, I grabbed his satchel and mockingly hit him over the head.

“Guy, this your English better pass my own o. Which Shakespeare poem did you steal those lines from?”

He managed to duck my assaults and suddenly jumped to his feet, sweeping me up with him.

“Madam, I write my own stuff. Smart, fine boy like me, how would I serenade you if they carted me off to go and join this nonsense war? God forbid. I could never enlist. Not when my Chichi needs my poetry.”

I screamed with glee and wrapped my arms around his neck.

“I just can’t figure you out” I sighed, shaking my head in false resignation.

“Ah! Then I really am a Nigerian” he laughed before stealing a kiss from me.

This post has been in the drafts for 3 whole months. I was skeptical about writing it because I feel like I’ve broached this topic for the nth time without coming to any real conclusion. Then I thought about it; this is my page and this new terrain of love and…

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The girl who once believed used to stand tall;
Every experience that should have broken her, only made her hungrier to see the mountain top.
What others called "barriers," she called possibility. 
Where others counted themselves out, she decided that her own life would be beautiful; 
Prosperity and success would remain at her right hand. 

"Press on," she tells herself, "the prize awaits you."

The girl who once believed set goals for herself — she worked hard and expected much. 
She was in her own lane, both judge and jury. 
You want to talk about pressure? Nobody could push this girl further than she already pushed herself. 
With each new height she reached, she dared herself to grasp for more. 

The girl who once believed tasted what divine favour felt like. 
She experienced what it was to stand at the highest peak and she determined that she would stay there through quiet, earnest diligence. 
At times fear would paralyse her heart, the thought of falling short breaking her into a cold sweat. 
The pressure she had clothed herself in since before she could remember became her second skin, something hardly noticed until moments like these when it reared its ugly head. 
Yet how could she ever stop the momentum? How, when all eyes were on her next move? No, the girl who once believed asked God to make her great but to keep her humble. 

The girl who once believed sacrificed and lost a lot in the process, but with her mind so focused on the task she set before her, she said to herself that soon every heartbreak and silent tear would be so worth it.

"Press on, you are nearly there. It is already yours."

The girl who once believed had ambitions that were far beyond her capacity, but was certain of and desperate for the God who could do exceedingly and abundantly more than she could ever begin to hope, dream or imagine.

I miss the girl who once believed. 
The girl who has taken her place is scared to dream. 
When life permits her to muster up the courage to hope, the painful reminder of things lost stops her dead in her tracks. It takes her breath away and leaves her keeling.

I miss the girl who once believed, but I am upset with her. 
She never accounted for what would happen if her greatest dream was taken from her. If life, in its spiteful game, dangled this prize from within inches of her reach — only to snatch it away as she was about to grasp it. 
She once had a faith that she thought matched those of giants but was astonished to see just how quickly it could shrink and neatly fold itself away. 
She had experienced what it was to sacrifice and to gain,
but never quite what it was to sacrifice…
and lose.
 
The girl who replaced she who once believed, also wants to believe. 
She is searching for what was but it has hid from her. 
She is looking for God's face but she is betrayed.
She wants to read the promises in her well-worn Bible and for them to come alive once more. So she recites the scriptures that carried her through some of her darkest periods but they are like empty words staring right back at her. 

"Jesus, you are the same yesterday today and tomorrow but I am struggling to trust you. And if I cannot trust you then I truly am alone in this world." 

The voice in her mind — the mind she laboured so hard to win the battle for — tells her that it is too late. The curtain has closed and nothing can compensate for what was lost.

I miss the girl who once believed. She would have cast down such nihilistic accusations with the truth of God's character. She was someone who looked forward to tomorrow and greeted each day with so much confidence, radiant about what it could bring forth. 
She used to be able to see. 
She had a senseless crazy faith, she was so sure of herself and the God she served. Even when all that was in front of her was a heap of ashes, she could hold onto joy, resting in the knowledge that they would soon be traded for beauty. 

I read some of the messages the girl who once believed left for me. 
At times, I laugh at what bitterness tells me was her naivety. 
I cringe at her certainty. I mourn her excited expectation.
But deep down, I hope to see her again.

The girl who once believed, she is still there, buried somewhere. And I know she will emerge again. In fact, I saw her today.
For a full day, she broke past the sadness, despair and trust issues. 
I really did see her:
She smiled, she laughed, 
She allowed herself to be prayed for and actually held onto the promises declared over her.
I was glad to see her. 

She told me she prefers life with God in it rather than out. 
She is holding God to His Word because she wants to trust Him again. 
And on my behalf, me the sad girl who replaced her, she will believe. 

Amen.

Two months ago, I wrote three pieces all about desire, loving hard (and unwisely) and ultimately learning to await the bridegroom Jesus. While in hindsight this feels like I was emotionally dumping on the timeline, writing has always been how I express myself. Now reading those accounts back, I can see how God has been maturing me and teaching me life lessons in real time. So, I wanted to share some of those lessons from what, at the time, felt like crushing circumstances. I ended those articles with so many questions, with so much probing around in the darkness but now with confidence I can say I was held by a never changing God.

Crushed Grapes Make Great Wine

Sometimes, God will let you go through trials because they produce endurance. James 1:3 says the testing of your faith produces patience, trying times in your life can have purpose. That is what I love about God: everything about His ways in us is redemptive. A few months ago, I started liking a guy again (shock!) and was finding it hard balancing those intense emotions with my relationship with God. I knew the time was not right, I knew I was trying to mould the person into someone he could never be, but I still really liked him. It sounds silly now but it wasn’t silly to God. It felt like I was being crushed underfoot, a feeling the female protagonist of Song of Solomon also conveys as she deals with her own lovesickness:

“All night long on my bed
I looked for the one my heart loves;
I looked for him but did not find him.” Song of Songs 3:1

After finally being apart from said guy for a while, I began to understand what Jesus meant when he said new wine must be poured into new wineskins (Luke 5:38). The thing is, Jesus is in the business of making all things new. All things, including old patterns and desires. Being made into a new creation sometimes feels like being stretched, until it feels like being crushed like grapes. But crushed grapes make for beautifully rich, sweeter wine. These last few weeks I’ve been experiencing maturation in Christ, I feel as though I have come out from the other side of restless desire stronger, more grounded and ready to bloom at the appointed season. But more specifically, I have learnt that while physical intimacy and desire are human instincts, to be completely led by your emotions is not wise. It can be damaging and God has given me a spirit of sound judgement to know that (2 Timothy 1:7). The female protagonist in Song of Solomon advises the reader, young girls (aka daughters of Jerusalem), “do not stir nor awaken love until it pleases.” This is not admonishment or pretention, but learned wisdom. Love waits, it does not demand. It is for this and many other reasons God’s Word says “guard your heart above all else for it determines the course of your life” (Proverbs 4:23).

Being My Safest Refuge Hardened My Heart

The times where I lapsed in judgement and opened my heart up to someone who did not have the capacity to bear it was hurtful. It made me distrustful. I was too hard on myself, admonishing myself for not knowing better. Men are wicked, how could I forget? (lol). But there is a vulnerability and quiet strength involved in choosing to guard your heart without letting that become a steely defence that barricades your own heart in. How do we guard our hearts but still love others well? I have tried being my own safest refuge and for a while the walls I built up did keep me safe but the trouble was as much as I wanted stability I also wanted intimacy. And while the thorns that had wrapped around my heart kept the wrong people out, it also choked out my ability to receive love. I do not want a thorny heart. So I tried making someone else my hiding place but that was never a responsibility they were meant to carry. The challenge was, could I trust God alone to be my refuge?

Life has pushed me in the direction where I have begun to delight myself in the Lord again. He is my safe space. He holds my heart and expands my capacity to love because He first loved me (1 John 4:19). With God as my dwelling place, I have been learning how to love healthily and not from a place of fear. I have been learning how to serve others and be there meaningly for those who need to me. For example, my close girl friends and I have started having weekly prayer meetings where we fellowship and pray for each other. It has brought us so much closer to each other as we navigate the women we are coming in and for Christ. I have also begun each morning asking God to highlight situations he wants me to pray for or intervene in as I take seriously His command to seek His will and kingdom, trusting that all other things will be added unto me (Matthew 6:33). And each day, with wonder I marvel at how He has shown me so many areas to represent Him in and empowered me to do so. I have learnt to forgive and let go, adopting God’s wider perspective and in doing so, I have become so excited for the future. I can truly say that for the first time in a little while, I have been so much more aware of all the wonderful ways I have been blessed beyond measures and comprehension. My life speaks of God’s favour and mercy.

Do Not Awaken Love Until It Pleases

All of this is to say that my desire for romantic love is no longer driven by desperation or loneliness. Sure, at times I feel the tug of longing but I know not to pick ripening fruit before it is ready, otherwise it will bruise. Besides, there are healthier ways to respond to that pull. For instance, sometimes a phrase someone says in passing or a funny video that made its way onto my feed or a debate with a friend will remind me of some quality about the guy I liked. And instead of getting sad about it, I smile to myself and am thankful that I can still think of him with such grace because I know that just because he is not my person, it does not mean my own life is not still replete with beautiful things. Even writing that sentence, I am quite moved by my own growth and because I did not even realise until this reflection just how much my behaviours and mindset has changed ever since I endeavoured to let God change them. Wow, I am even tearing up, a wave of emotion just hit me as I document how God is moulding me into a woman of grace and virtue. I hold no ill will because I am so hopeful for all that this life can bring. I have changed. And not just in regard to this old crush, but also when it comes to my heart. I am not the stubborn but sad girl I once was. As I have entered early adult life, I can see myself changing for the better and I guess it is making me emotional. It’s good to be in touch with your feelings. My journey of growth is testament to the patient love that I have been the product of. God has moulded me and promises to continue in this labour of love forevermore. With each day that passes, love has grown and swelled within me.

Stargirl, Your Husband Is Coming!

(I had to sneak a Raye reference in here somehow hahaha)

God is preparing my person. But I am also a person God is preparing someone else for. Isn’t that so cool? Whoever my person is will know and love the version of me who is healed and being redeemed by Christ. That person will meet the me who doesn’t smother him in expectations that only God can give. I have learnt that as my relationship with God develops and strengthens, He is turning me into this woman of grace capable of having loving and strong relationships with others too. In all this, I have learnt that God is stable. He is strong. He is steady. He can catch all my mess and falls because He has counted all my tears and remembered me.

My fire will never be “too much” for Him because He himself is a consuming fire. In short, God has anchored me such that the man that He will join me to will meet this version of me. He will love all of me and only add to my life and my journey with God rather than hinder it. Two will become one with Christ the third chord who holds us tightly together.

The thought of being someone’s beloved bride one day is joyful, but right now I am loving being the prized bride of Christ!

With love,

way of wander

If you made it this far, do have a read of the articles this piece is in response to!

Another related article:

Mercy Moses

DO NOT AWAKEN LOVE UNTIL IT PLEASES

“I ADJURE YOU, O DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM, BY THE GAZELLES OR THE DOES OF THE FIELD, THAT YOU NOT STIR UP OR AWAKEN LOVE UNTIL IT PLEASES…

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4 months ago · 77 likes · 3 comments · Ohhavemercy

• I Will Overcome: Talk about a dramatic entrance! Raye boldly sets the scene and declares she will rise above misjudgements of her character, trials, challenges and insults. Her vocals remain strong and controlled throughout giving us a mighty crescendo that genuinely felt like a curtain call. The album is off to a fantastic start - 7/10

• Beware.. The South London Lover Boy: Wickedly hilarious and musically fun, Raye warns us of the South London Lover Boy whose only desire is to sleep in your bed… - 10/10

• The WhatsApp Shakespeare: Queue my new favourite Raye song of all time! Roadman Raye returns and she’s so relatable in the way she reads these useless men. I love how you can tell she’s in the studio having fun with layering the sounds; it’s quite literally a symphony, sonically moving from upbeat and melodramatic to introspective and slowed all emphasising the progression of this ‘modern day tragedy’ - 10/10

• Winter Woman: Exploring the fallout of her past dark winter love experiences, this track contends with a man’s empty promises of love and jealousy of the other woman. It carries a similar dark vibe as escapism but with a more mature sound. Although I was not a fan of the speeded up section toward the end, the overall song remains musically grounded - 9/10

• Click Clack Symphony: I fell in love with the song at her concert, it is such a girls anthem and the orchestra is quite literally everything; shoutout Hans Zimmer! His influence conveys a sense of transitioning from the gloom of winter past to glimpsing the first ray(e)s of sunnier (or should I say happier) days ahead - 9/10

• I Know You’re Hurting: BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ONE!!! After she performed it at the NFL I had to watch literally every performance. It’s such an encouraging song and really shows off the control Raye has over her voice, asserting herself as one of the timeliest artists of this generation. Those runs and belts are EVERYTHING!! - 10/10

• I Hate The Way I Look Today: The juxtaposition between the jolly sound and the sad lyrics is so Raye-coded. I like how vulnerable and honest she is in her music while sticking to her commitment to the craft of music; it’s what makes her so compelling! Her scatting is everything, combined with the old school feel of the barbershop choir and saxophone, Raye once again demonstrates her deep appreciation for music! - 6/10

• Goodbye Henry: Another sad song about a boy but isn’t that life, sigh. This track reminds me of a sadder version of ‘Worth it’ but feels like a letter written exactly to the boy in question albeit knowing he might not ever hear it. Plus, no way she got Al Green on this! - 6/10

• Fields: Oh the vocal layering on this track!! And the softness of her tone, there’s almost a country twang to it. I’m getting Hannah Montana vibes in the best way possible! The choir touch too, wow the ending took me to church!! This music indeed contains hope - 7/10

• Joy: I adored hearing this in concert with her sisters!! Continuing the hope/gospelly sound, this album has tracked the changes in Raye’s life that come with each revelation and the song quite literally feels like a booming declaration of joy over her life, exercising her authority in Christ; “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” 2 Corinthians‬ ‭10‬:‭5‬ - 9/10

• Fin: How whimsical, this last song has the similar enchanting feel as ‘Fly me to the moon’ and the mystical aura of ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’. The sun exists behind the clouds, we must dare to hope! Finally, the listing of all the people who contributed to this album actually puts into perspective the absolute powerhouse of a team Raye has behind her that help make her vision come true, engineering a sound so wonderful that undoubtedly will speak to all listeners. An incredible dramatic orchestral ending to a fantastic second album - 8/10

The way I added almost every song to my playlist, I’m in love with this woman honestly.

The verdict is in: ‘This Music May Contain Hope’ gets a solid A* from me!

Raye’s musical sound and her deftness in mastering pretty much every genre is what makes her truly a musical icon. She is an incredibly well-rounded artist and every listen is a transformative experience. However, what draws me most is how honest and relatable Raye really is, infusing scripture and belting lines that often feel like familiar diary entries. Honestly I think a lot of people, including myself, will finish this album feeling incredibly encouraged and uplifted. Music is indeed medicine; I’m walking around the house with an extra pep in my step this morning.

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The thrill of being noticed, the thrill of being attended to, of being wanted and the prospect of being intimately known is like a drug for the lonely woman. The new attention of a man who sought you out, wrought you from your hiding place and shone a spotlight of affection on you as he admires his new prized possession, makes the lonely woman, like a diamond unearthed, dance with radiance. In the spotlight she is seen, she is trophied, she is marvelled as her flecks of splendour reflect back onto the discoverer. Under his gaze, the weight of her prior loneliness is magnified. His spotlight exposes how long she has waited for love to arrive, how long she has waited to be known and adorned. And so she dances all the more, finally above ground she declares her time of manifestation has arrived at last, the isolation and darkness of her hiding place has ended. Never mind the cracks that are appearing in her diamond heart or how the man’s gaze feels so hot, so heavy, so suffocating as it blinds all her judgement. No, the lonely woman would rather dance all the more, fearful of returning to that dark place, she must sustain the attention of the discoverer. But he is already wandering, his light waning and admiration dwindling, for she was not as shiny as when he had first plucked her. The lonely woman’s heart is splintering but she’d endure it, her surface tainting but perhaps if she danced harder he would stay? Perhaps if she changed form she could convince him to adorn her. I am your treasure she pleads, treat me as such! The lonely woman would rather lose parts of herself for his fleeting comfort than return to the timely process of formation that happened in the secret place.

She is dancing now but nobody is watching. The man has gone. What did she do wrong? Perhaps she did not dance hard enough, perhaps she did not give enough of herself. Or did her brilliance not shine bright enough? Had he not captured all her radiance in their performance of love? Had she not been willing to shed off all sense of worth in pursuit of a now aloof man? The lonely woman, splintered, dulled and confused, creeps quietly to the secret place to be formed once again. The process is quiet, timely and requires ongoing surrender and humility. And the lonely woman has been resisting that. She does not realise she is a diamond in the making and so will keep being plucked before she is ready by those who see her value but are not willing nor able to honour it. She will keep being unearthed, dug up and brought to the fore every time she responds to the faint drilling she hears on the surface, each drill a premature beckoning to bloom before the appointed season. And the lonely woman responds because oh how she yearns to be seen, to be desired and admired. But she is never kept. Desperately, she comes up for love but is shortly met with scorn.

The lonely woman will keep thrill seeking until one day, she examines herself and realises the state of exhaustion she has put her soul through. The agonising her diamond heart has had to endure. The fractures she bears because she has given herself to the greed of those that did not wait for her time of revelation but used her for their short lived amusement. But the lonely woman is learning that the labour of formation her creator carefully bestows upon her is an act of deep, steadfast love. That to be made whole in the secret place is not an act of punishment but protection. The end result is longevity, endurance, a foundation that weathers any storm. The lonely woman is learning that every time she is hurt, her creator is always right there to tend to her wounds, to exchange shallowness for rootedness, to produce pressure that makes diamonds fit to last.

Repeated interruptions speak of deep loneliness, impatience and unbelief. But the woman learns that if she waits, if she trusts, and she sees that the Creator loves her, the harvest is great, the yield bountiful. The lonely woman sees her formation is a labour of love though she had not noticed it before. And one day there will be someone on the other side who will wait for her. Who will not root her out, demand her light then leave her once his insatiable hunger demands the uprooting of another. The thrill of an impatient man’s ‘love’ has long gone. In her creator’s arms, the lonely woman is safe to confront desire, sadness and the loneliness of isolation. She had been looking for love on the surface, every extraction a shallow promise of love’s worth. But she sees now that true love waits. It does not demand. And it does not steal, kill or destroy. When the time is right she will emerge, clothed in her creator’s dazzling glory. But in the meantime, having discovered her creator’s love once again, the secret place is where the lonely woman would rather be.

Thank you for reading this far! This is probably one of my most vulnerable pieces yet in that its inspiration came from a sudden and overwhelming realisation that I am so precious in the sight of my Lord. Chasing intimacy ultimately stems from loneliness but I realise and feel that God loves me. His love can be loud, but often times it is quiet and something we must still ourselves to tune into. His love is steadfast, it is shown through action not empty promises. The secret place is where I am formed, the shadow of the Most High is my dwelling place. In this piece, I used an extended metaphor of the diamond formation process (stored underground where there is pressure and the optimum temperatures to transform rocks into diamonds) and what happens when that diamond is forcibly taken out before the formation process is complete. At the time of being plucked, it feels like discovery, it feels like your time of appreciation is at that moment but in truth, someone who loves you would wait (1 Corinthians 13). It felt as though scales had fallen from my eyes, I experienced the joy of revelation and the joy that can accompany the thrill, that intoxicating stupor, being gone!

God keeps me in the secret place not as punishment but as protection. Many of us seek a love that gratifies temporary desires, we act in ways that respond to our flesh. But love requires depth and anything built without depth will eventually demand it. God is more concerned with who you are becoming than how quickly you are being noticed. Formation comes before manifestation; before a flower blooms a seed is planted, before a baby is born it is formed in the mother’s womb. This is the order of nature that God intended, He has a plan and a process, have patience and the full strength of love will be revealed in time.

love,

way of wander

Other recommended articles on this subject include:

Sisipho Mbuli

What does it mean to move through life as a woman who is admired, desired, but never kept?

I Want to Be Loved…

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Mandy Morris

The Discipline of Desire

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In my first year of university, God healed something in me. He removed my misplaced desire for male validation by filling up that void with more of Himself. For the first time, I was experiencing intimacy with God rather than chasing after confusing illusions of love. I found myself excited to explore more of Him as there is always so much more to God that could ever be known in a lifetime. As my relationship with Him strengthened, I was finally allowing Him to reshape and restore how I related to everything else which had previously been unhealthy. I suppose a side effect was that I no longer was very interested in men anymore. The prospect of a romantic relationship became something I deferred for my future self, there’s an appointed time for everything after all.

To this day, one of my favourite Psalms is Psalm 139 as every time I meditate on it, I am so moved by how much God knows me and cares for me intentionally; such knowledge is too wonderful for me (Psalm 139:6).

“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” Psalm 139:7

God is always right there with me, a truth I have experienced time and time again and that can never be denied. But one thing that has been pressing on my consciousness lately is the realisation that life is about learning how to contend with being a body made of flesh that also possesses a spirit. What does it mean to be an earthen vessel, a fallible human, containing the majesty and Light of God? I will tell you what it feels like: weighty. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Jesus commands that we abide in him, for without Him we cannot bear such a reality alone. Jesus isn’t just telling us this because He desires relationship with us. Yes, that’s a major part of it but consider what being made into the image of Christ and becoming one with him actually entails:

“always carrying around in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who live are constantly being handed over to death because of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you.” 2 Corinthians 4:10-12

To be the light of the world is to constantly carry around in our mortal bodies the dying of Jesus. Do you know how heavy that is? It means every day we are experiencing a form of remaking that requires a dying to self, to old ways and patterns. It is the cost of rebirth on this side of eternity. And it’s not just figurative, it aches. I am reminded of that painful imagery in John 15 of being pruned by God - the process by which we become more fruitful for His kingdom. The dying, like the pruning has purpose: Jesus ultimately died for our deliverance; to release us from the slavery of sin and into right standing with God. That process involved death. We are continually being made new, transformed into the image of Christ as we pursue him but this rebirth, being born from above (John 3), necessitates death so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in us. When I prayed at the start of this year for a deeper intimacy with God, for Him alone to be my dwelling place that I would be rooted in, I knew it would be something God honoured and would lead to my flourishing. But I didn’t realise how hard the part before the flourishing really is.

So stargirl…what’s that got to do with you not being interested in men? Well, continuously carrying death in a fleshly body and experiencing this process of renewal is something I didn’t quite anticipate would involve pain and conscious denial. Mid-last year, I met a man who succeeded in making me interested in romance again (lol). And despite him being emotionally confused, He was sincere, truly loved God and wanted to do right by me. Nonetheless, the point I make here is that for the first time, I was properly experiencing being romantically loved by someone and the physical aspect that can accompany intimacy. While I am grateful that that brief chapter ended, I wonder if, prior to it, a large part of my previous disinterest in men had also been rooted in a type of avoidance. I wanted to avoid getting hurt, avoid emotional responsibility, and avoid disappointment. But beneath that, I still wanted to be known, to be pursued, and to be loved. And don’t get me wrong, I receive all those things and more in Christ, but pretending to myself that I did not also desire a type of physicality that is often found in romantic contexts (note: I’m not talking about sex but rather a sense of physical closeness), was just me lying to myself. So I’ve hit a bit of a wall. I’m sure with time and talking to God, He’ll help me to scale it but as of now, I find myself stuck between desiring physical intimacy and yet wanting to honour God completely.

My desire for physicality is not bad. Scripture never minimises desire but speaks of a God who wants to safeguard it. I think sometimes Christians demonise what are actually completely normal human experiences and fearmonger you into rebuking yourself for desiring what humans typically tend to want. My emotions are part of my human design. The struggle lies in neither overindulging these emotions nor disregarding them completely. A few days ago, I felt terrible that not only was my awareness of my desire for physical intimacy heightened and more foregrounded but I did not feel bad for wanting it. I quite liked the idea of being held close, and was a love language of physical touch really so bad? These thoughts frightened me - had I become desensitised to sin? What would the consequences be? Did this make me a terrible Christian? Or was I still spiritually infantile? I saw all these things as a test but to be honest, I did not know whether I’d pass or fail.

As I am writing this article, I am thinking of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Side note, but thank God Jesus was just as human as he was God; it comforts me to know that He made me and understands thoroughly these desires I’m describing. He occupied the same battle between flesh and Spirit and is someone I can look to during moments of confusion such as this. Anyway, in his interaction with the woman, Jesus remarks that she’s had 5 husbands and is currently living with a man she is not married to. The woman was clearly ashamed of this matter considering her social and cultural context and the fact that she was drawing water from a well in the middle of the day to avoid the other women. And yet she was still living with the man. Surely if she felt bad about it she’d leave him? Or perhaps she too, while knowing it was wrong, also desired closeness and physicality, even if it came at the cost of her social status. Even if it wrought her with shame. And Jesus saw that too. But He didn’t condemn her. Instead, He could identify that she was looking for a sense of wholeness in these men and was not satisfied. She had drunk but was still thirsty again. After all, physicality is only ever just one aspect of intimacy although it tends to masquerade itself as the full package. But Jesus is the real deal, and so He offered the woman himself; living water so she would never experience lack again. The story makes me smile, seeing how gentle Jesus is with the woman and her joyful response to His kindness. It shows Jesus is really there at our points of need, including our bodily desires. Similar to the woman, there is something in physical closeness that I also like but I also know continuously looking to satisfy that desire in all the wrong places would leave me feeling worse than I did before. Like an addict, the craving would never be satiated, constantly chasing a high with each one shorter than the last and the lows that follow deepening in profundity.

This article is still a clumsy attempt at bringing all my thoughts together, especially as I don’t see much Christian content addressing human desire from a female perspective and in a way that does not chastise it. I’ve been thinking about how physical contact isn’t evil, humans were designed for it and it is something that can be enjoyed beautifully in the context of a Christ-centred marriage. But even then, human marriage is not something I’m betting on completely fulfilling my satisfaction as even marriage falls short of what it’s like to be the bride of Christ.

I’d never fully understood biblical imagery of Jesus as the bridegroom and the body of Christ being his bride, awaiting his arrival. But I suppose this dying that I’m carrying around in my body, though heavy, is part of that preparation for his arrival. I want to be somebody’s bride one day, but maybe this resurfacing of experiencing the desire for physical intimacy and God allowing me to wrestle in the contention, is a way of presenting me with a choice as opposed to a test. Can I acknowledge these emotions but, trusting that God holds me and my desires in his Hands, be willing to surrender them to Him as I pursue Jesus my bridegroom? In Him, all yearning and desire is met, He is the goal I press toward and although the road ahead is traversed through a daily dying (which for me currently looks like daily tough decisions that sometimes I succeed in and sometimes I stumble over), I know it will be so worth it. And I’m not in the dark as I navigate the journey, as James 1:3 says this experience produces endurance, leading to spiritual maturity, and inner peace. My task is to allow that endurance to do the work it was intended to do so that I may be “perfect and completely developed…lacking in nothing.”

This is a lifelong journey (and a very way of wander style article as I am still in the process of living out all of this) and while I’m sure this is not even a fraction of the future spiritual challenges to come, I can be thankful for this period of wrestling I am currently going through because it shows God is honouring the prayers that I set out from the start of this year. Through and on the other side of all this, is God.

thanks,

way of wander .⋆♱

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“so…how’d you get that scar?”

Wrought with anger and tormented by shame, Zuko has intimately known the cost of sonship. Born to the most powerful dictator of his era, Zuko spent nearly a lifetime weighing against the will of a tyrant as he desperately sought the restoration of his honour. Underlying this though was a sharp self-loathing that burned within him, spurring him on his relentless pursuit of the Avatar, symbolising his desperation to win back his father’s love. Burdened by sonship, Zuko was caged by a unique type of slavery that distorted the meaning of the love he so sought after, a slavery fallen humanity is all too familiar with: striving to earn the Father’s love.

Throughout ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ Fire lord Ozai (Zuko’s father) is presented as an unknowable omnipotent being, his face deliberately hidden by shadows and his frame illuminated by scorching tongues of fire. While I do not intend to compare Ozai to God, I think it’s fair to say that from the perspective of humanity severed from God, the Father can also appear as a set apart, unknowable entity whose righteous wrath, judgement and holiness define the gap between us and Him. In short, God is not like us, his standards unattainable and the void seemingly beyond closing. It is this revelation of God’s majesty in comparison to his own unworthiness that prompts Isaiah to wail “Woe is me! For I am ruined…For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).

With the existence of such a chasm and the constant failed attempts throughout the Old Testament of a people so marred by sin trying to reach out to the Father, the point I’m trying to draw out here is the impossibility of earning righteousness and right standing with the Father in one’s own strength. As humans are so unlike God, in an inverted way, Zuko felt the piercing sting of trying to reach his own father’s love which he set high up on the altar of his heart. In self-identifying as bearing the mark of “the banished prince,” he realises his own accursed fate and wears the scar to prove it.

alienation and anger

As the show progresses, the warring Zuko battles within himself and the agony he undergoes is one that is particularly moving. There are many moments we find ourselves sharing in his frustration as each repeated failure to capture the Avatar feels like another tug at his destiny, slowly being wrenched from his grasp. Enslaved by the cage of this fruitless cycle, Zuko becomes increasingly alienated from himself, wrestling with questions of who he really is when for so long he has been defined by the ache left by his father. He laments the extent of the vanity in his pursuit of the Avatar when he realises he is still deeply unfulfilled even after finding favour with Ozai. Having tied his righteousness, his ‘rightful’ earning of his father’s love, to the Avatar’s capture, his failure to this end burns him up with a rage that almost bolts the door of his prison of torment:

In this anguish filled speech, Zuko confirms that he has not yet escaped his self-deception and the impossibility of finally possessing the love of his father in the unconditional manner he had always longed for. Even after having sat at the right hand of his father and heralded as the perfect prince, Zuko tastes the bitterness of unfulfilled redemption:

“During the meeting, I was the perfect prince. The son my father wanted. But I wasn’t me.”

You see, there is nothing sweet nor fulfilling about having to strive for love, to work for a precedent and carry a cross your shame could never bear. Having run for so long, Zuko realised all that striving came at the cost of himself. A love earned is not one that saves nor redeems but leaves one reeling in the ravages of who you used to be. This state of eternal condemnation is one Jesus saved us from when he tore that impenetrable veil. There is but One prince; the Prince of Peace, seated at the right hand of Father, whose perfection and love for us took him to the cross. Despising its shame, he died so that we could be forever reconciled in relationship with God (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus took on the cost of sonship, a cost that neither I nor Zuko could carry as we would lose ourselves completely. Jesus took on our bondage by emptying Himself of all His glory so that we might not only be saved but experience the full redemption and joy of being true sons of God.

slaves to sons

“And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:35-36)

Jesus changes our status from slave to son, a status Zuko so desperately sought after. He did this not by subjecting us to that gruelling task of trying to claw one’s way into abiding relationship, but by dying for us and freeing us from that which kept us so chained. In this, he wrought sonship for us, bought with His blood and bestowed onto us a new identity that fulfils that longing deep within us:

Zuko did not experience the shift from slavery to sonship in regard to his own father, precisely because his father’s love could only be bought with a striving that came at the cost of Zuko’s complete alienation from self. The only one who loved Zuko, even in his foolishness, mistakes and betrayal, was his uncle Iroh. When Zuko returns to Iroh, burdened by guilt, shame and regret and begs for his forgiveness, his uncle cuts him short and pulls him in a loving embrace, much like in the story of the father and his prodigal son. In what represents the culmination of his character arc, Zuko experiences the freeing redemption that Iroh’s forgiveness releases him to, confirming that Iroh was more of a father than Ozai ever was. Iroh explains that he is relieved that Zuko did not lose his way in an exchange which I believe beautifully demonstrates the difference between what a love earned and a love freely received does to our souls: when earned, it’s as if our souls harden and we toil with the dissatisfaction of unmet desire to be known intimately and unconditionally. When received freely, we are released to be the people we were called and made to be. For Zuko, that looked like ending the 100 year war of good and evil by helping the avatar institute an era of peace and kindness throughout their world. For us, our destiny means embracing our identities as Children of God. Our Father who from the very beginning wanted to partner with us, to make us co-heirs of the earth and display His glory through us is calling us back home. Our Father who saw us, knew all the mistakes we would make in life, and still said we were good and worth fighting for, so much so that He sent his only, guiltless Son to save us from perishing and gift us with eternal life with Him, life to the fullest measure (John 3:16).

The world tells us we must earn our place in it, that amends must be made and penance paid for the rest of our days. On the contrary, Jesus paid it all and forgives and embraces us in full measure, much like uncle Iroh. We are so loved by Jesus. He removes all our shame and bestows a righteousness, confidence, fulfilment and honour that could never be earned. Zuko’s story and search for honour is one appreciated by many, including myself, but what I love most about it is how much I am reminded that I am redeemed, wanted and loved by God.

Dear weird black girl,

your desire to escape the box the world has put you in, to rebel against idle categorisations that mean your character is misread as a proximity to whiteness — it’s drawing you closer to the reality that race is both a social construct and a lived experience.

In Fanon’s ‘Black Skin White Masks,’ chapter 5 (‘The Fact of Blackness’) recounts the agony of being denied that human endeavour of curiosity, meaning-making and soul searching on account of being black. It is important to note that Fanon does not posit blackness as the hinderance to this endeavour. This is a point he is at pains to make throughout the book: there is no escaping ones blackness, just people with black skin in white masks, living in the unique torture of being imprisoned in the colonisation of ones mind.

No, I think with Fanon when I say my blackness is my social reality; it is my being with all the assumptions it carries and announces before I even get the chance to introduce myself. Fanon’s chapter is an oscillation of scenarios in which he desperately tries to reclaim his blackness, to escape the oppressive white gaze that accosts him through racist encounter after racist encounter. In the end, it all proves to be in vain as Fanon slowly realises whiteness continues to be the frame of reference.

“The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes.”

Black Skin White Masks, Fanon (1952).

‘The Fact of Blackness’ ends with Fanon weeping, expressing the finality in the denial of his humanity through the metaphor of being a king forced to self-define through an appendage. It is these last few lines that have been tugging on my own soul.

My being black means I have social and cultural experiences that have come to profoundly shape the many aspects of my identity. Living in a Western society in which racial hierarchies are foundational, like Fanon my soul too desires to go against the grain. Being acquainted with a systemic whiteness carried through from the school curriculum right down to the media we consume, I think it is little wonder that our dominant ontology of blackness, even within the Black community, continues to be constructed in relation to whiteness. Even when constructed to oppose whiteness, the latter continues to take the foreground — a dilemma explored by Fanon as he uncovers how even the most anti-colonial reclamations of blackness still borrowed from a colonial ideological repertoire.

How difficult it is then to refuse those terms of racialisation that have come to shape the present day realities we exist in. Such were my thoughts during a recent Dr Umar talk at the University of Oxford as I winced at his portrayal of a Pan-Africanist dream that still used the divisive frameworks used to sustain the global colour line. And such are my thoughts whenever I come across jokes on social media about whether a black girl is ‘whitewashed’ because she tucks her braids behind her ears, enjoys indie music and overall just doesn’t fit that archetypal image of what a black girl in the West is supposed to be.

The question at hand then is the same one Fanon proposed in 1952: what does it mean to be black and to claim a Self when for so long, to be black is to be Other? What is blackness when neither proscribed by structures of whiteness nor defined through reactionary means that continue to centre the logics of racialisation? Who am I when I decide the terms of my own blackness? Is such a thing even possible? Can I refuse the caricaturing and objectification of an ontological condition that is supposed to be mine? I think that is what living as a black person in a white world necessarily involves. My soul tells me I’m human. The world tells me I’m Black. The fact of the matter is, God made me both.

My quirks, my interests, my tastes, my talents are neither solely because I am black nor borne in spite of it. Let me be clear, I am pro-black in that I am overjoyed when Black people are bold enough to want more, to dream wilder and to lay claim to that which the world historically has denied them. I delight in the knowledge that Black people’s existence alone is in and of itself an assertion of selfhood. I especially want to clarify that I am against adopting colour-blindness as a worldview because while race may be a social construct, its impacts are searingly real and colour-blindness often ignores or wishes away such realities. Rather, in this essay I hope I have shown that when I declare that I am indeed a weird black girl by popular cultural standards, I am saying I refuse for my lens of the world and my humanity within the world to be marked solely by colour. If I do that, I risk affirming a system that has arbitrarily and unevenly attributed value to phenotype and culture.

So from one weird black girl to another: hello, my name is Dara. I am fascinated by the planets and the stars (hence the pseudonym ‘stargirl’) because as cliché as it sounds, I’ve never felt a firm sense of belonging. I’m ‘otherworldly’ if you will, in the world but certainly not of it. As for my interests, I like to read, I’m in love with African literature and historical fiction and I’m returning to my first love of writing as I experiment with personal essays and short stories. As a social sciences student, I love the process of developing an argument and following it through. I cry at films that grapple with the human condition and get lost in the love stories of real yearners in coming age of movies. I rock long braids but I’m also learning how to take better care of my natural hair. Sure, I like the aesthetic of wigs but really hate wearing them as I find them rather uncomfortable and I’ve seen one too many snatched edges horror stories. I love the city. I love my culture. I have that Nigerian pride that says I would not exchange my Yoruba identity for this world or the next. I have a hyperbolic and sardonic sense of humour. I quite like my strange quirks and adore the people who love me for them. The world has taught me to be hard but the truth is my heart is huge and I enjoy pouring that into spaces where its seen, valued and reciprocated. I like to belly laugh and go on jobless side quests with my friends as we navigate that strangled freedom of our early 20s. I’m still learning how to do makeup and discovering what my sense of fashion is. All in all, I’m into all that whimsy, weird, creative, avant garde stuff.

Life so far has been an amalgamation of experiences all pointing to what it means to be made up of such an array of interests. I’m growing in understanding that the desires of my heart are intentionally designed and connected to the One who foreknew and loved me. I’m on my own human journey of meaning making. I am a Black person who refuses the scripts imposed upon my personhood while at the same time shouting at the top of my lungs that to be Black is to be Human, entitled to one’s own unique life journey of soul-searching that nobody can take from you.

So dearest weird black girl, fear not, I am one too.

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“I can see you are stressed because you don’t know what your final decision is going to be.”

These are the words my mentor gently told me after I had spent the last 20 minutes trying to disentangle the nexus of worry, fear and distress that had held me captive for the past week.

Being in the final year of my undergraduate study, I have been thrust to the mercy of that dreaded thing called ‘the future.’ You know, that unwelcomed temporality, so arresting in its ability to straddle the line between tangibility and intangibility. Its incessant urgency, colonising how you exist in the present and condemning how you lived in the past. Combine this with the unrelenting reminders around my university that space is being created for the new, ultimately entailing the clearing out of what was. Or as the saying goes, “out with the old and in with the new!”

Ah, the future, how it weighs on me and obliges me to grieve the moments I’m already living in. How it subjects any action I take to a never ending internal dialogue of “if I do this now, will I regret it?” In short, the prospect of the future has so harassed me that I have struggled to live for today.

The issue is not so much the fear of a lack of future, it’s the anxiety of not knowing which future is mine to take.

I have often jokingly referred to myself as a ‘thought daughter:’ I love meaning-making, I delight in trying to enter and comprehend the worlds of others. My mind very rarely sits still, planning for tomorrow and the day after that, tracing an imaginary timeline of events and contemplating all possible outcomes. If l could live and exist outside of the march of time and expectation, I would travel deep into the heart of inquiry, get lost in the quarries of scrutiny and the profundity of those whose minds captivate me. I want to know everything and anything.

Since I was a child I have been described as having enormous potential, I could do anything I committed myself to and being blessed with an upbringing that valued learning, I was stretched and pushed, passing hurdle after hurdle. The phrase “I can’t do it” is not one that can be found within my ontological repertoire. And having grown in my relationship with Christ, I accredited my ability to do all things through His Spirit in me just as Philippians 4:13 told me. And yet, here lay my salvation and my ruin: precisely because I can do anything, the future, now replete with even more possible avenues to take, has meant that I do not know what I should do. My mind, once constantly on the move, now recoils in the face of bountiful options.

You see, up until this moment of my life, the path of what to do next has seemed to naturally flow from one point to another. From secondary school, to sixth form, then university, making the right choices had always been within the larger schema of education, offering safety and a sense of control. So with my graduation looming close by, effectively launching me into the abyss of the ‘real’ world, it is suddenly as though the sky is perhaps too limitless. In the face of a future, overwhelming in its tumbling endlessness, the word ‘anything’ finally finds its true weight. And for a ‘thought daughter’ like me, ravenous for the pursuit of knowledge, such a reality terrifies me because for once…I don’t know.

My capacity to think and think deeply comes from the omniscient One who created me in His likeness. He whose boundless wonders provide a lifetime, no lifetimes, of searching and probing until my heart’s content and still not even scraping the surface. And yet, while my mind reflects my Creator in this way, it also resists Him. Because an avarice for knowledge that is not grounded in the fear of the Lord, is one restless in its desire for control.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Proverbs 1:7

The thing about life though, is that it is uncontrollable. If you’re anything like me, you can convince yourself you have a tight grip on the steering wheel with all bases covered but all it takes is one unforeseen variable for everything to come crashing down. And it was from explaining this anxiety to my mentor that she perfectly surmised my existential lack of control that had left me reeling in the face of an unknowable future. I was panicked because there were so many choices to make and I didn’t know which was the right one. I see now that no matter how much I try to venture into the future, God brings me right back to the present and asks me “my ‘thought’ daughter, who do you depend on?”

Life is slowly teaching me that living by faith, not by sight, actually requires you to trust without seeing what the final result will be. Who would have thought huh? In moments of transition like this, I am reminded that I am time-bound with a heart oriented toward eternity. That is the ache God intentionally designed for us to live in.

Recall Paul in the New Testament. A man so anointed by God to go out to the nations in the power of Christ, that one might say he really could do anything. I mean, this is a man who on many occasions escaped death by the skin of his teeth, only growing more influential in his spreading of the Gospel to the aching. And yet this ability to do anything, Paul acknowledged, could be where his own undoing lay.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7 he speaks of a “thorn in the flesh” the Lord gave him over to, to keep him dependent on God. Without that thorn, Paul realises perhaps he would have fallen victim to his own pride. Without that thorn, he may eventually have convinced himself that he was no longer in need of God. Such was the impressive nature of the heights he had reached, it would have been all too easy to delude himself into thinking that he was actually self-sufficient. And so when God tells him in verse 9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfect in weakness,” Paul is finally free to release himself to the truth that his sustenance ultimately comes from His maker.

So, all this got me thinking: I can truly do anything. My future is limitless, my potential is yet to be fully realised. But I am not my own. The ‘thorn’ in my side is that I cannot escape my humanity. I cannot be the captain of my own destiny. I don’t know what the future holds, so I must depend on God. And there is so much liberty and peace to be found in that truth. Something I’m sure Paul was experiencing when he allowed himself to be weak because it simply meant leaning on the power of Christ resting on him. My life, including that temporality called the future, is solely and firmly in God’s loving hands.

The magnitude, breadth and depth of the future is not something to be feared but something to release control of. There is only One who stands outside of time, the eternal self-existent One who has no beginning nor no end. His name is Yahweh. Attempting to control and lay ownership over that which is His only produces the existential crisis I have laid out in this essay. And having learnt a thing or two about change and its inevitability, I think a part of my resistance to release control came from a distrust of God’s intentions for me.

In the past, change has been the mighty blows against the sandcastle fortresses I was building. It has been the scattering of any plans I thought were firm. And ultimately, it has been the end of my desire to control the uncontrollable.

So while I cannot venture into the future nor pretend to know what it beholds, I can know God. I can know His character. I can know His heart toward me and His promises that He will work out all things for my good. I can know that He will make a much better decision about my future than I ever could. And accepting that has released me to the reality that all I have is today.

And if it really is true that the decisions you make today are investments in your future, what kind of decisions can I begin to make? Not ones that rob me of my capacity to exist in the present, or make me hyper fixate on the fact that this chapter too will soon close. Rather, if Jesus is the one at the helm of my future, today I ask: how can I orient myself toward Him? How can I live today surrendered, open and perceptive to the work He’s doing in my life? How can I use today to draw closer in relationship to Him? How can I know Him intimately and eventually come to trust Him?

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Matthew 6:33-34

I’d like to close with a line from one of my favourite songs, ‘If I Could Have Anything’ by Housefires

“May I love your presence Jesus, more than any gift you’ve given me, more than any crown I could receive, more than all my dreams.”

The future is unknowable so I turn to the one who is knowable. Yes, I really can do and be anything, but today I choose to be an offering: carrying my cross daily, willing to be led by God’s promptings, even if I don’t know that the end point will look like.

The desire to want to do good is set against the presence and reality of sin in the human being. Or in other words, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ coexist in the life of the human being.

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭7‬:‭21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Humans, in our state apart from God, are capable of doing ostensibly “good” actions in tandem with “bad” ones. I’m aware of the simplification for sake of argument, and the reason I’m not addressing questions like “who defines good and evil?” is partly because I think humans, from society to society (and I say this as a social anthropology student) do have a shared sense of morality on most foundational matters, and mostly because that isn’t the topic of discussion here. Rather, I’m interested in this central contention detailed in Romans 7:15-21 that deftly describes the actions of the human being:

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭7‬:‭15‬-‭21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Much energy has been devoted to try to explain this phenomenon — philosophy, science, religion, sociology etc — all of them asking (and disagreeing on) what the meaning of life is. However, a core idea about what constitutes the human experience returns, well understood by Paul (the author of Romans) who was very well acquainted with Greek philosophy and co-signed however many years later by most of us: You live, you do good things, you make mistakes, you do bad things all while trying to achieve some sense of purpose then you die. In light of this, popular sayings like “YOLO” become a comfort – we’re all just messed up individuals living on a floating rock right?

Wrong. I actually think that’s the greatest lie that’s ever been sold. A lie that has stolen a lot of potentialities and killed a plethora of possibilities before they even had the chance to be born. We were made for so much more than that. We were made to do life with God and for God to bear fruit that doesn’t just last for a lifetime but forever — that which can never be taken away from us our undermines by other “bad” actions. In short we were created for eternity. The world increasingly tries to convince us that we’re not that special, sure we have some better-than-average ideas every now and then and might even be able to create some things that last a while but ultimately we’re expendable, another cog in the machine until we die. Even if that were true, and indeed we’re only here for a passing moment, the sheer determination of humans to try to bypass their mortality, to try to create and build something that outlives them, and the insane amount that humanity has been able to achieve in a relatively short timespan already testifies to the idea rhat this can’t be all that there is. Inadvertently, while we consent to the notion of ‘you only live once’ our actions inadvertently  contradict that, so desperate to believe that cannot be all life is chalked up to be.

What if there actually was a way to break and escape that never ending life cycle of sometimes doing good, sometimes doing bad and deceiving ourselves that somewhere inbetween that, ‘meaning’ can be found. The space between that cycle is too narrow, too limiting for that restless thing we hold within us to be fully realise. Life indeed is too short for that to be all we were made for.

When Jesus says in John 15 “Apart from me you can do nothing” He’s saying we cannot break free from that cycle and be the people God created us to be. You can’t escape that central contention if you’re denying the One who offers freedom from it. Though we try, we cannot transcend ourselves and the limitations set upon as apart from the One who stands outside all such limitations. The meaning we think we’ve found, apart from the creator of the entire universe, surely cannot is be compared to that which is found when our lives are enveloped in His?

To those of us who are already Christian we say yes Jesus died for our sins and yes he secured our salvation but have we ever seriously asked for what purpose? I fear many of us have flattened it to “so that we can make heaven” which actually means we end up flattening our view of who Jesus is and what exactly He came to do and continues to do. But even if we take that flat interpretation at face value: why do we want to make heaven? Eternity with God, eternal partnership, ruling and co-creating with the never-ending One who makes all things good and beautiful. Right? Well the wonderful thing is, He has invited us into that now.

Life on earth after deciding to follow Jesus isn’t just waiting idly until you go to heaven and maybe hopefully getting a few more people to come with you through ‘conversion’. Jesus, by breaking that central contention I’ve been talking about all throughout this article, made it possible for us to go beyond a “sin, seek forgiveness, sin, seek forgiveness” back and forth dance with God and actually live in close personal relationship with Him like He intended us for. God made us and said that it was good (Genesis 1:31). He intended to do life with us right from conception and invites us to partner and rule with Him. That is the great hope of the Gospel I am so hungry to share.

What does all this mean, in normal terms?

Well, that deep desire buried at the bottom of your heart, that dream, that quiet aspiration that deeper intuition that you can’t quite give words to — these are things God Himself placed there with the hope that we would come looking for Him (Acts 17:26-28).

These deeper yearnings reflect a piece of Him in us. He is our missing piece, the missing context that finally gives our lives purpose.

“I have seen the task which God has given to the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]—yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end.”

‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3‬:‭10‬-‭11‬ ‭AMP‬‬

I recently saw a quote that said “God intentionally made your calling beyond your natural ability so you would have to depend on his grace to fulfil it.” Humans have been able to create and achieve incredible things all while denying God His rightful place in their lives. So how much more if God was in it? I’ve been coming to that realisation lately having surrendered some big goals of mine and leaned totally on God then subsequently watching how he blows my mind and takes my breath away by exceeding even my wildest of dreams (Ephesians 3:20-21).

So if you read this far, what am I encouraging you to do?

Dare to want more.

Dare to believe that maybe you were indeed made for more than this.

Maybe you are meant to go against the grain, even when the dominant narrative is calling you foolish for it. Maybe that thing you always thought was impossible or that dream you convinced yourself was crazy, or even that goal you fulfilled and still felt empty afterward, maybe all this is actually the quiet yet permanent trace of the One who created you, calling you back home.

August 5, 1967.

Chidiebere.

The Sisters say you have joined the fighting. I suppose that is fitting for you, Chidiebere, the one who always treated life like a competition. Always pushing me aside to snatch the first piece of meat from the pot or racing me to the end of the street by the sickle-shaped mango tree, the dust from the road pillowing up in yellow clouds around your feet. Those moments seem so long ago and yet I wish I had cherished them more deeply. Your name means ‘God is merciful’. Sometimes, before bed, I whisper it slowly, tracing each syllable like a prayer, as if saying it aloud could somehow bring you back. “Chidiebere”. I hope God will be merciful to you now.

The school is quiet – just me and a few girls remain. The Sisters have been kind to me and are trying so hard to maintain a sense of normalcy. They offer to pray with us before lights out, they diligently hold mass services, but truthfully it all feels like a parody. Like they’re characters in a play and everybody knows it but them.

It’s strange, this quietude. At times it becomes paralysing, wrapping itself tightly around my neck to the point where it’s difficult to breathe. I feel so helpless sitting here in this convent, day in day out, knowing that you are out there. Knowing that Nsukka, our home, is gone. Knowing that Mother is alone. Knowing that Father is dead.

I often pray that God is merciful to you even though I was not. Do you remember when Father caught you with those touts at Obinna's junction? He beat you terribly that night while Mother wailed hopelessly, begging him to stop. And I remember your face: steel-like, unflinching, your gaze fixed on some distant point as Father belted you furiously. It was the first time I felt fear toward you because I knew that you knew I was the one who told him. Since they told me you joined the fighting, I have been wondering how I would be able to keep on living if you died but I realise, that night, I had already watched you die. Was joining the war your way of getting back at me? Well, I want you to know that I am sorry.

Growing up, you were better than me at everything and I resented you for it. Though you were my junior, Mother constantly compared me to you.

"Why can't you be like Chidi?"

"Why can't you bring back good marks like your brother?"

"Nne, they should have born me Chidi before you."

And I hated you even more for basking in all that attention. So, when I saw you laughing with Obinna's gang I thought to myself, I will show our parents the true colours of this Chidi they love more than me. And yet, seeing you get beaten like that brought me no joy at all. That hatred is still there but now it is aimed at myself.

They say hatred breeds hatred. Chidiebere, please do not hate me.

December 9, 1967.

Chizaram.

Your name is deeply ironic now. 'God answered me.' Well, I know you will never answer me, seeing as there is no way to send this letter to you. But maybe God will answer me by giving success to us in this war. Though I doubt it. They have finally allowed me to train with a rifle. It's old and the trigger jams if I pull it too hard, but still—it is better than a stick. There is talk that the men on the other side have Sterling submachine guns and FN FAL rifles thanks to the British funding. They say those men are better armed, better trained and have blocked off nearly all Biafran supply lines. Our last stronghold is Port Harcourt. It won't be long until that falls too, I'm sure of it. We are fighting a losing battle, but I guess that is fitting for me.

Training in these dark, cold barracks—with nothing but sharpened sticks, empty stomachs, and a shared sense of impending doom—feels like a sick metaphor for my whole life. When I joined this war, it wasn't because I was convinced by some nationalist dream of freedom, neatly wrapped in half of a yellow sun. It wasn't even because I saw the other side as enemies. I joined because if this really is a losing battle, then I might as well go out with some dignity, right? Nevertheless, I've been on the losing side long enough to know how this will end.

When I think of home, I picture Mother with her brows furrowed, pounding uziza seeds in the mortar while I watched, quietly sharing her sense of dread. It's a dread I've grown deeply acquainted with. I wear it like a noose that stubbornly hangs around my neck. I barely notice it anymore. It steadies me when I hear the shells bursting too close outside, or the quick succession of feet tearing through the underbrush, or the dull sound of a machete striking bone. I suppose that noose has always been there, I just wasn’t aware of it. Or was it the noose around Mother’s neck, now passed down onto mine? She was always so busy with the housework, her hands constantly moving, her head always bowed in the presence of Father. I guess that was her way of dealing with it. I think I envied you. The way you seemed to sidestep that oppressive dread so easily. How you could move through that house untouched, unbothered. That must have been nice. You could just be. No doubt I was Mother's favourite but the weight of all that expectation…I'm glad to be free of it now.

The lamp will soon go out. Wherever you are, I hope you are well.

May 26, 1968

Chidiebere.

They have taken Port Harcourt. That is what Sister Nancy told me last night, nervously fingering her rosary whilst avoiding eye contact with me. This anxious, tense expression on her face reminded me of something you said years ago. It was when you were about twelve years old and clearly had been listening to too much of Father and Uncle's arguments about politics. You came into my room and asked me, “why do the white people think they know more about Nigeria than us?” I didn’t know what you meant. But now with the Sisters constantly hovering over me, suffocating me with their prayers and incense and supplications, I just can’t stand the performativity of it all. I know they mean well when they encourage us to ask God for peace, in the same way Sister Nancy meant well when she delivered the news about Port Harcourt but it’s so hard to take them seriously when they don’t have to be here. I wanted to ask Sister Nancy why she was telling me this instead of going back to Britain and demanding her leaders to stop this nightmare. I wanted her to go back and show the world that Biafra is dying, that children are being starved. I want her to demand that the world see us. But instead, her and all the other Sisters are here, still performing mass, still clutching their prayer beads and still repeating their Hail Marys. Everyday they come ushering into our dorms testifying about the next headless body found unclaimed, the next city under siege, the next clinic populated by babies with stomachs swollen from kwashiorkor. I know my anger is misplaced. I know that without the Sisters sheltering us like this maybe I would have been the next news headline, but I just hate not being able to do anything.

Quite frankly, I could not care less about what happens to me anymore. Whether I live or die is no longer a question that bothers me. My only fear is that you will die. Actually, what scares me the most is the thought of you dying without knowing how sorry I am. I am your elder sister and yet I hated you with the fury of a thousand half yellow suns. And now, as I sit in this lonely room, with Biafra and its false promises of hope and glory crumbling all around me, that hatred inside me has collapsed into nothing but emptiness.

Maybe this is God's judgement. I sound like Sister Beatrice now (you know the one I told you had that funny walk?) but unlike her, I'm not referring to this war. I think I needed to be separated from you like this to realise how cruelly I treated you. Perhaps I needed all this pain to finally understand yours.

The only peace I pray for now is yours. In my last letter, I said you treated life like a competition but I’m starting to see that you’ve had to navigate life with your fists constantly raised. You had to learn to build an endurance that not even Father’s brutality could break, so what's more a war? If anyone deserves peace now, it is you Chidi.

January 13, 1970 

Chizaram.

I am thinking of that bended mango tree. The one at the end of the street, near Ogige market. Those mangos were really sweet, weren't they? Sometimes, when I eat the pap they serve at mealtimes, I close my eyes and pretend it’s sweet syrupy mango juice trickling down my throat. They stopped air-dropping food weeks ago, but I wonder— have you had the chance to taste a mango again? Mangos were your favourite, I remember.

Last night, I dreamt of that harmattan we had a few years ago, and how when it ended, I brought back four mangos from the tree. Mother helped me wash, peel and dice them before arranging them on a platter. They were so ripe and as much as I wanted them for myself, I brought the platter to your room instead. And I remember how you smiled. It was the first time in a long time that I had seen you smile. It was nice to be welcomed by that instead of your usual stony silence. I hope, despite everything, you still get to smile like that.

This morning, they said that the General fled to Ivory Coast. He wasn't really the inspiring type. He never convinced me at least, with all those speeches of nationhood and independence. We will lose this war, undoubtedly. I knew that already. But maybe when all is said and done, I'll finally be allowed to just exist. Like you did.

Morale is practically non-existent among the men now. Who can blame them? Our platoon has more than halved. On excursions, every few metres we are picking up the limbs of fellow men, picking up the pieces of lives severed from their bodies. We gather their remains and write letters of condolences that will never be sent, that will never be read.

I saw the corpse of a man who reminded me of Father. In some twisted way, I am glad that at the very least, he died at the start of this war. He didn't have to see all this mess. He doesn’t have to be tormented by the blood of innocent men crying out from the ground. You remember we used to call him Iron Man? He was as hard as nails, totally unyielding. It’s what got him killed in the end. His final moments replay in my mind every time I’m sure death is about to capture me in its snare: the night they came to take him, there was no fear in his eyes. He stared death right in the face and still, he was unmoved. I wonder, when death does finally come to greet me, will I be the same?

These letters I write to you are beginning to pile up beside my mattress. They will never reach you but writing them is the only time I experience peace, even if it's short-lived. Writing them is the only time when that noose around my neck, loosens, just for a moment.

Do you still pray? Does God answer you, Chizaram? When I had that dream about the mangos, I'm almost certain God was answering me. At least He is reading these letters. I think He is reading my heart.

It is getting late, they will order lights out soon.

If, as the saying goes, history really is written by the victors, I hope whoever finds these letters will write mine: the story of a fighter boy with a rusted rifle and a hunger for a life as sweet as mangos.