My emotions were written on his skin. His beautiful dark brown to yellow baby skin was jagged with red marks, dark swellings and shadowed by a rash that spread all the way to his back. I had not slept at all in 36 hours but maybe, on the whole, maybe I had not slept in two months.

I found myself looking for a church with one of those names that my heart usually turned its eyes at, Fire Power ministries, Revivalist burn church, Holy Spirit presence house and others with more names than I can come up with. I myself had attended an Anglican church with a succinct neat name, as I was growing up; one where Mother’s Union members met after church to judge how well the other was dressed and how far ahead the other mothers’ children were getting along in life.

As I scanned the road; having driven for a little more than an hour though it felt like three, I realised that the road was littered with many like the one I was looking for. My stomach shrunk and my hopes receded. This was the second day and the second time the phones were off just when I needed the directions the most. Lingering in my mind above this though, was the second question the woman on the other side of the phone had asked me after she requested for my second name, You are from the West?

I had recoiled and hesitated in confusion for I had thought that the things of our earth were so much lower than the things of heaven, that there were not supposed to be tribalist sentiments in the enlightened and more so, not in this delicate post election season of divisive politics and taut tensions. But then again, maybe it was the time for them to finally show up clearly in the church. When I finally found it, abandoned in the parking lot of an empty building, I wondered grimly whether this was the place where I would find my redemption or whether this was how far my sorrows would lead me.

The first time I had heard of ghosts, I must have been less than six years old. I always circle my childhood memories to around five years or after eight years. I can’t remember all the years in between but I remember some days. Like the day I heard about about the invisible hand, like when I had snippets about an aunt who had died and guzzled them down and created a story, a connection and dreams that would haunt me into my youth. There were also days like when I attended my great grandfather’s burial and I slept off and woke up alone in a room near the burial site, a five or six year old looking for where everyone had gone; and I saw a crowd of people in the distance throwing soil and trying not to get pushed into a deep pit. There was a song they were singing and though I remember it to this day, I had banned it for years, from playing in my head.

This time though, I had not just watched. I found myself spinning with dreams and anxieties and nothing but punctured gut instincts to guide me on my next steps forward.

This time, three quarters of my support system had disappeared into a land that had been often mocked without restraint in Primary school, with the phrase, We shall not wait for Karamoja to develop. The rejection towards Karamoja was that its tall, dark skinned cattle rustler nomads still did not wear clothes to that day. They still adorned themselves in only beads in the typical backward African way that we modern Africans had overcome. Yet they, had kept most of their old ways, bad and good; still scarring and marking their foreheads with pock mark designs probably made by some hot iron instrument. They cut their hair, in tribal fashion and the women formed their ear lobes into large holes and placed rings inside them like tyres.

Before he left, my systems were already in shambles and particularly my mental alarm had been sending reflexes and setting off false signals in the middle of the night only to miss the most important signal that should have been picked. The day at the hospital and the night at the hospital, watching baby struggle to breathe, had sucked a lot out of me. I had done, as I usually did under enormous stress, done everything with a much more emphasis than usual on what normal would look like to a curious eye or a bored stranger. I had come straight from the nebulizers and IVs into the Judge’s chambers. I was there to support a man who had heavily relied on and entrusted me to fight for his cause. I did not know, that he already had more backup than I knew about. And because of this, I had been caught up in the middle of a battle that was being fought in a different realm. There is something about the law, an unwritten rule, the less you know [sometimes], the better.

I have been shaking uncontrollably for days. I have felt my heart rushing, swinging, pouring. My son comes to join me in the chairs at night. He thinks that is where we sleep now. I never forget to check the list of every normal thing that normal unaltered unshaken people do. I check on others. I laugh. I smile. I talk a lot. Even though I have experienced something that I can not forget.