the small sun beside my name
(for mummy, a second telling)
I praised her once alreadyand every word of it stands.This is the part that would not fit inside the praise. She writes to me in the mornings.Good morning my sunshine, she begins,and sets a small sun beside the wordso that even the phone knows what she calls me.Then, further down, gently,there is a meeting this weekend, the last day,the drive is not far,you will be edified, you will be glad you came. She is calling me back to the house of God.I stopped going years ago.She has not stopped calling. I read it lying down.I turn the phone face down on the sheet. By afternoon another line arrives,no weight in it, no reproach,asking whether I received the first.She knows I received the first.She has never once made me say the word no. I said it plainly to her one time, years ago.I told her why I left, what did not hold,what I could not make myself believe again.And she did a thing I still turn over in my hands.She agreed with me.She said she has seen the cracks herself,the rooms where the house does not stand true.And she stays. So it is not a zealot calling me back.It is a woman standing inside a buildingshe keeps her own quiet questions about,waving at her son in the streetbecause she believes it is the one with the roof on it,and she has spent her whole lifemaking certain her children were not caught in the rain. Her persistence is not doctrine.It is weather.She is afraid the sky will open over meand she will not be there with the coat. She tries every road to the same door.You will find peace there.You will be edified.You will meet a good woman among them.And I say I am travelling. I say the week is heavy.I say every word except the one,because no would land on herlike something falling from a high shelf,and I have spent my lifecatching things before they reach her. There is money in it too, if we are telling it whole.A woman who owned nothing for thirty yearswill reach past what her arms can hold.A house bought on a cousin's promise.Food for a brother's wedding, offered freely,arriving on my phone at six in the morningwith a deadline already fastened to it. But consider what it is to stand before your own peopleand say, the food is mine, I will handle it,when you once counted coins on a table in Lagosto make one cup of rice reach five boys.That was never catering.She was buying back thirty years.The invoice came to me.I have been unkind about it exactly once.I heard my own voice doing itand did not care for the sound. A tailor who joins two cloths leaves a seam,so the joining can be undone.Whoever made my mother did not leave one.I have looked for it.The hand that reaches past what it can carryis the hand that carried me miles through a feverwhen there was no car, no money, no one on the road.One hand. Two motions. Nowhere to cut. And there is a question underneath all of itI have never carried to her.Whether what binds us is love,or the shape that surviving togetherleaves in people afterward,two hands that learned to hold onin a season when letting go was dying.I went looking for that seam as well.It is not there either. Next month the message will comewith the small sun beside my name,and something will follow it,a date, a deposit, an invitation,and I will feel the old tightness climb my throat,and I will answer the part I can answer,and love her completely,and turn the phone face down on the sheet. — tachi
next in the long tellings the ground was holy 