SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 81
and rain, but it remains. Nobody sits in it. Even the children avoid it, though they were born
after you left and have only seen your picture. They seem to understand, somehow, that this
particular emptiness belongs to someone else. That space has not been filled. That space has
not been erased. It has been preserved.
I used to wonder why Mama never moved it. During my service year, I nearly threw
it out once. It was brittle and had begun to sag at one corner, but something in me paused.
I lifted it and found a line of ants moving beneath it, as if even they had made peace with
its permanence. I cleaned under it and put it back. That is what we do in this house. We
maintain your absence like it is another child we are raising. We sweep around it. We feed it
with our restraint. We give it space to grow.
I once heard someone say that when a man leaves his family, he leaves behind not just
his presence but the shape of his presence. That shape becomes a room of its own. Papa, you
left us with a room we did not ask for. A room we still have not entered. And though your
photographs still hang on the wall, though your clothes are long gone, and your laughter no
longer echoes down the hallway, your shape remains. We move around it.
Our people say, “Aka puo n’ikpere, ọ buru ozu.” When the hand leaves the knee, it
becomes a corpse. You were the hand on the knee of this family. You were the one meant to
steady us, to hold us firm when the wind shook the walls. But when your hand left, Papa, the
body grew cold. I watched Mama stiffen. I watched her learn how to walk alone in a house
built for two. I watched the house shrink—not its size, but its voice. You cannot measure
silence in square feet, but you can feel when a home stops speaking.
There is a small crack in the wall above the kitchen door. I am sure it was there before
you left, but I did not notice it until after. It widened during the first rainy season you were
gone. I remember standing under it, bowl in hand, waiting for Mama to dish soup. Water
began to drip from it, slow and brown. Mama placed a bowl underneath and never looked
at it again. That crack has not been repaired. Sometimes, I think it is our way of saying we
remember. Other times, I think it is just that no one knows how to fix something we cannot
name.
Tonight, the house smells like wet cement and mothballs. The rain has painted everything
with that familiar scent—earthy, cold, ancestral. It reminds me of days when we would stay
indoors with blankets wrapped around us, listening to the thunder while you told us stories
about the war, about boarding school, about everything and nothing. Those were the days
when your presence filled the house completely. Your voice would rise above the storm, and
we would feel protected, even when the power went out and the candles flickered.
Now the power is gone, and the only light in the room is from the lantern. It casts your
chair in shadow. And I sit here, writing a letter to a father who might still be alive, or might
not. A man who disappeared without telling us how to live with the space he left behind.
The rain is easing, but the night is still wet. The plants in the yard are bowed with
water, their leaves slick with the kind of shine that only comes after a storm. And inside, we
are dry but not untouched. The water did not reach our skin, but it reached something else.
Something older.
I feel it now, in my chest. That familiar ache that always starts when I say your name in
my mind. I do not say it aloud. Not anymore.
But you are here, in the silence.
The rain has stopped now. The quiet it leaves behind feels like the kind that follows a
funeral procession—heavy, patient, and full of eyes that do not know where to look. Outside,
the plants drip slowly, one leaf at a time. Inside, the walls breathe again. The room no longer
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