SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 42
SINE QUA NON
vibrates with the sound of falling water. |ere is only the soft ticking of the lantern name
behind its glass, and the crickets, distant but insistent, trying to remind the world that life
continues after any storm.
I have read through this letter again. |e paper is nearly full. |e ink on the orst line
is dry and faint now, but the words still sit with a ormness I cannot undo. My handwriting
has grown tighter as I wrote, the loops shrinking with each sentence, the letters holding their
breath. I have come to the part I have been avoiding since the beginning—the part where
memory stops being a story I tell and becomes something I must admit. |e part where this
letter becomes not just about you, but about me.
You left so quickly, Papa. Not with shouts or the rustle of suitcases or the slamming of
doors. You left with the same silence you taught us to carry, the kind that says more by saying
nothing. You left on a Wednesday. I remember because we had ukwa that day, and Mama
had soaked it overnight. I was seven, sitting on the cold noor in my uniform, polishing my
sandals with spit and a crumpled piece of the Nigerian Observer. You walked past me with
your phone pressed to your ear, your face unreadable. You stepped over my legs like I was part
of the furniture. You said nothing. And then, you did not come back.
|ere was no funeral. No oocial declaration. No visit from a messenger to say you
had started another life, or ended this one. You became absence without form. Mama never
changed the locks. She never packed up your belongings. It was as if she expected the sky to
return you. For years, your things remained untouched. But time, Papa, is not a thing you
can tell to wait.
Your clothes thinned with dust. Your photographs faded. Even your scent—the mix of
Vaseline and pepper soup and the smoke from your Benson & Hedges—evaporated from the
walls. And then, there were the slippers.
You left them behind. Brown leather, cracked at the edges, nattened at the heel. I
remember them always being slightly too large for your feet, but you refused to change them.
You said they had shaped to you, that anything newer would pinch. You kept them by the
front door, pointed outward, ready for the day. |ey were the orst thing you removed when
you returned home, the orst sign that you were inside. And when you left, they stayed. For
years.
Mama left them untouched for a long time. Each evening, after sweeping the corridor,
she would line them up again, as though you had only stepped out to buy matches. She never
said anything about them, but I would see her glance at them from the corner of her eye.
Once, when she thought I wasn9t watching, she picked one up, held it for a moment, then set
it down gently and walked away. Over time, the leather curled like dried okro leaves. |e soles
hardened. |e imprint of your heel, once deep, began to fade. One day, during the third rainy
season after your disappearance, I noticed that water had pooled inside them. |e storm the
night before had blown them slightly of their place, and the rain had olled them with mud
and leaves. I left them like that. Eventually, they were gone.
But before they disappeared, I wore them once.
I do not think Mama ever knew. I was eight then. She had gone to the back to slice
pumpkin leaves. I slipped my feet into them at the door, carefully, slowly, as if they would
bite me. |ey were enormous. |ey swallowed my toes, made me feel like I was trying to
walk inside someone else9s skin. But I walked in them anyway. I walked across the corridor,
out to the veranda, and stood there. |e leather was cold. |e front of the slippers slapped
against the ground as I moved. I did not go far. I stood where you used to stand, hands folded
behind your back, eyes squinting against the morning sun. I tried to feel what it meant to be
the man who had stood there. But I could not. I only felt small. I only felt the air that you
had left behind.
I took them of and ran back inside. I wiped the mud from my feet and said nothing.
But that feeling stayed with me, Papa. |at strange, tight feeling in the chest. |e
knowledge that absence can ot so snugly around your skin that you mistake it for inheritance.
I have worn that absence longer than I ever wore those slippers. I have carried it into my
marriage, into fatherhood. I have passed it, unknowingly, into rooms where my silence meant
something I never intended. I ond myself withholding joy the way you did—storing it in
hidden corners, saving it for days that never arrive. I ond myself leaving rooms without
explanation, thinking space will heal what words cannot. I ond myself becoming the shape I
hated, the outline of a man who once olled a house and then vanished from it.
I do not write this to blame you. I write this because I want to stop becoming you.
Tonight, I looked at Ugo as he slept. His chest rose and fell with that deep, steady rhythm
children have when they dream without worry. He murmured something—just a sound, not
a word—and turned on his side. I thought of how many nights I fell asleep waiting for you
to come back, how often I dreamed you were standing in the corridor, smiling, holding a bag
of roasted groundnuts and asking if I had behaved. I do not want my son to wait for ghosts.
I want him to know my footsteps by sound. I want him to know the diference between rain
and silence.
I have written this letter with no intention of sending it. |ere is no address. No name
on the envelope. But it is here now, real and complete. I have said the things that have lived
in my chest for twenty years. I have called you by your absence, by the sound of rain that
never touches skin. I have mourned you without knowing if you are dead. I have forgiven you
without hearing you ask for it.
|e lantern is nickering now. |e oil is low. |e room is almost dark, and I feel no fear.
Just quiet. I fold the letter. I place it on the table. And I blow out the light.
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