quintessentially C

  • All My Flower Girls Scatter Ashes

    My mother drove a white pickup truck.In summer, she let Coral and I ride in the bed.Coral waving at the street boys, while I watched behind heart-shaped glasses.All the greatest loves of my life are born in spur of the moment,by some mundane act.And they die a tragic death.I’ll tell you that every day is…

    chereoge

  • Oh No, Here She Goes Again

    There is beauty everywhere my love,Even in the scariest.If only you will look.And there is ugliness everywhere,But listen love,I am a beautiful thing.I’ll hand you peeled clementines and sliced apples.I’ll come home to you at two on a Thursday night. I’ll stand at your window and I’ll throw pebbles till you let me in, and…

    chereoge

  • To Phil, With Love

    (with excerpts from nursery rhymes in red) Dear Phil, Do you see the shadow trudging behind me? He’s very, very like me from the heels up to the head. He’s taller, darker, emptier, and with him, every day is Groundhog Day. So I’d crawl back under the covers and maybe in six weeks it’d be…

    chereoge

  • The Last Man Standing

    I adored him 4 years and 5 girlfriends before I gathered the nerve to speak with him. In the end, it did not matter who loved him the longest. It’s the pattern of things to end, I now recognise, to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Day after day, I lived in a…

    chereoge

  • To The Things that Look Better in Retrospect

    The day the dandelions sprouted, I found myself thinking, there are still beautiful things. That evening, I walked home in a sort of drunken haze Kicking pebbles, spotting angel numbers, colours seemingly brighter than the day before, birds chirping for the first time in months, geese honking, and I thought, If I could paint this…

    chereoge

  • The Woman Before Me – 5

    5. THE NEED TO STAY At 9, I read the quote on a billboard, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’. At that time, I thought of the wife, praying over and over again to the same deity believing He could change him. At 15, the deity…

    chereoge

  • The Woman Before Me – 4

    3. THE HOLE IN THE CEILING Silence. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to block out the noise.It was the kind of noise that came with such a cold, unsettling familiarity. I think of it like the buzz of an aircraft in the 1940s, right before an explosion. You recognise it…

    chereoge

  • The Woman Before Me- 3

    3. THE BOY IN THE PHOTOGRAPH He bought her that dress for their traditional wedding. The one she never got to wear, because he never gave it to her. I hear her talk about it on sad days; how they quarrelled and he withheld it from her. I wonder if he still has that cloth,…

    chereoge

  • The Woman Before Me- 2

    2. THE SUBSERVIENT WOMAN Trevoh Noah once said “The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women.” I had known men like this but I was blind to the one who lived in that…

    chereoge

  • The Woman Before Me- 1

    1. THE TEA-GREEN HOUSE Money makes everything look good from the outside. It creates the illusion of a perfect home. A one storey bungalow painted tea green with a roof the colour of the forest. Brand new cars parked in the garage, only used on special occasions. A german shepherd lying at the front doormat,…

    chereoge

  • The Bottle in the Ocean

    Life is rather- mystifying.One minute, you’re certain you’ve figured out what direction the next few minutes is headed,but in those next minutes,you’re in the back seat of a carreligiously bopping off a stranger you’ll never meet again,your hands treating every bit of him like the holy grail you only get a single feel of,whilst he…

    chereoge