You know, one of the hardest things about you going away, was that for you, it seemed easy. For me, a part of me was being ripped away.

It was you. It was the world we had built. It was the circles of people within whom we lived, built upon you as the corner stone. It was the way your son looked forward to seeing you every night when you came home. Did you know that you are his superstar?

The lockdown was hard on many. That was well documented, spoken of constantly; but for me, I breathed easier each day that the Human Resource didn’t manage to take you away. I awoke and you were there. I spoke and you were there. I walked to the next room and there you were. I was not keen on the gates reopening. Any talk about you being locked far away for months without knowing when it would all end made my heart fall that I dared not even add to the conversation.

So in peace and contentment, I cooked and baked, maybe every day; and we sat down to watch MasterChef every evening. It was the year before our first born turned two. We watched him grow up, I, you, together, for the first time. I knew that a time like this would never come again.

You were home. You were mine. You were ours.

I never had big dreams before I met you. All I had was people I loved. You became one of them, and for a long time, you were suddenly everything; all consuming, all powerful.

Big goals, big dreams. I learned that from you. I did not know that someone could curate their own world. I had thought that we only took what was given and that was the end of it.

It seems as if I have spent a lot of time looking for someone to tell me who to be, to tell me who I am. To the person who walks to the stranger asking, Do you have any idea who I am? And they truly need an answer.

I felt like you left me to the wind, to deal with me as it pleased, accessible to the wolves of the night. You know nobody wants a lone, reactive, free-roaming particle [an unpaired electron] around their tired, quintessentially upset, breadwinner; nobody, except the solitary wave, on its path into the sea shore.

Now I wonder, if I am becoming who I was supposed to be. Do you remember when I prompted you to ask me what I wanted out of this bubble we surfaced in together? I have always said the same thing. It turns out that it has not changed. But maybe, it was a path I was always meant to discover myself.

…

I can’t believe Milton became more like Lydia and Lydia became more like Milton. The Carl Jung quote is true, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Milton became more emotionally expressive and Lydia, less easily triggered. In him, she seems to have found the security of being claimed and seen as a standalone piece. Uche had definitely not given her that distinct singularity of person. To him, she seemed to have been one among many. Uche had his own journey of [self]love to make. Oh what it means to be special, to be made special to one! [Most of season 5 Love is Blind is laced with unnecessary swearing, boastfully spoken with the pride of a teenager who wants to fit in with the crowd. I had not really understood what it means to be assaulted auditorily on a daily basis. I make it a point to avoid contemporary American rap.]

*

Sometimes we look for validation in broken places, unmended scars, hurting people.

The bum of a [B]Ugandan woman is like an asset you can deposit in a bank and get money. The slow confident way its holder crosses the road, is like one who has assurance that they cannot, by any means, be knocked down.

*

I wish Ugandans would stop saying ‘dey-ta’ and ‘ra-w-t’ to mean data and route. How many times will we be colonised?