SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 82
SINE QUA NON
vibrates with the sound of falling water. There is only the soft ticking of the lantern flame
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. The paper is nearly full. The ink on the first line
is dry and faint now, but the words still sit with a firmness 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. The 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 floor 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.
There was no funeral. No official 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, flattened 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. They were the first thing you removed when
you returned home, the first 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 wasn’t 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. The soles
hardened. The 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. The storm the
night before had blown them slightly off their place, and the rain had filled 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. They were enormous. They swallowed my toes, made me feel like I was trying to
walk inside someone else’s skin. But I walked in them anyway. I walked across the corridor,
out to the veranda, and stood there. The leather was cold. The 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
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