quintessentially C

  • Out And About

    Dearest reader, wait… wrong blog. I fear I’ve been gone so long I’ve forgotten how to write my blog. But I’ve not been gone for nothing! Last year I took the internet’s advice and went out to touch grass, and I never went back inside, truly. I’m just starting to have my weekends to myself…

    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

  • My Top 5 for 2022

    Ladies, Gentlemen and Others; Give it up for the last post of the year- My Top 5 from 2022. I did this in 2020 and I decided to do it again this year, and next, and next. The five categories are, movie/tv shows, top book, song, blog post and new discovery. MOVIE/TV SHOWS When I’m…

    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- 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 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