EdenWanderlusts

My four year old comes home from school and proudly informs me he now knows where our friends are. ‘Which friends, baba?’ ‘Wales, England, Scotland, Germany, Fro- France, and umm.. LOTS!’ he finishes this little revelation by counting to ten in Welsh, Spanish and Afrikaans, as he does every day, and asks me to tell him a story. Some days it’s a story about our hoover, the swimming pool in the garden. Today it’s the world. Subconsciously I grade my story PG. PG because he considers the little boy down the road his friend, considers his granddad his friend, considers the black child his friend. Because when

1. Loving you was giving you the knife and helping you plunge it into my chest. 2. It was apologizing for all the blood, the inconvenience of being with me.  3. Your mother left you and her mother left and your sister is desperate for the glue that holds a family together and so you spit at me that all women leave. 4. Your father lives in a mausoleum that he only remembers as 'beautiful blue eyes' and 'failed marriage.' He's been lost for years. 5. You no longer trust the oceans that are my eyes. 6. My father once gave my mother a Judas kiss and promised her he would come back. I warned her. 7. You leave more than you ever arrive.

Mother, he is a lesson I have still not learned. He leaves nebulae kisses on my neck and they do not mean war - most days.When darkness fell and with it my demons appeared he held out his earthly hands and asked me to trust him. I let him lead me through the darkness and I came out alive. Mother, how was I to know that one day I would have to battle his demons. Days when he curses the silence of his world I cup my hands around his ears so he can hear my voice and I whisper, I love you I love you I love you. My love does not calm him any more. His face has lines filled with every paranoid thought, every miserable failure, every little dro

I am a lioness. I will not be tamed by a man with a handsome face and hands carved out of velvet. Don’t you dare make yourself at home, my legs were made for walking, not wrapping themselves. I will not bow down prick-length and at your service nor will I allow you to tame me or teach me how to arch my back. I will not accept your sweet whispered nothings if your hands cannot abide by your honey flavoured words and instead decide to explode against my skin like the rotten pulp of fruit. My father taught me well in the art of heavy handed abandonment, do not gloat at my body or tell me how you ‘could drown in those eyes̵

My mother tried to fix her leaking heart by filling her womb and my father tried to fix his emptiness by engulfing his children. Oh, Persephone, I did not mean to come steal you. I did not mean to replace your light with a vast darkness, my love. The underworld was creeping with death, the sea filled my lungs with water until my voice leaked out of my body and was replaced with silence and all that remained was to vanquish everything with my anger filled tornadoes. I, who had to claw my way out of my mother and my father, I, whose name even means torment and suffering, I, who just wanted something beautiful for once in my life.

Father; noun a man in relation to his child or children. a man thought of as affectionately: the protector, the gentle giant, a girl’s first love. Father; noun a man with a hidden agenda that involves blue-eyed, blond girls with a deep   misunderstanding of the meaning of, ‘daughter’. a man thought of when the dark creeps in, the raised hand, a girl’s first broken heart. You live in a country where every 4 minutes someone gets assaulted - most of them are mothers. sisters. brothers. people with a good heart. You live in a country where every day 50 people are murdered - the man who just finished a night shift a

"Tell me not of heartbreak it plagues my soul, it plagues my soul."                   - Mumford and Sons. You cling to me in places I did not, still do not, expect - The cold where my hand falls when I look for you first thing in the morning. The quiet instead of the unnecessary noise I know so well from you on lazy days. The vanished kisses and warm hands on my expanding belly. The touch on the small of my back. Every blooming tree and flower. The rickety benches in our favorite park. Having traded the term 'deafness' with you. Your silence is so deafening it hurts like no other. When it is dark I wake up without your little n

I hold the dogs ear because I can feel her heartbeat pounding through my fingers and it is so loud that I do not have to listen to my own heart slowing down in realisation that everything is not exactly the way it should be. That, in my common sense, there is a dark cloud forming and dangerously overhead. I ignore this. I pretend that it is just a sudden wave of warmth en gloving my heart instead of admitting that something has knocked on one of my chambers, introduced and made itself at home as Fear. This new resident behaves as if he rules the place and he is like a neighbour from Hell: they were there first so unless they mur