Zyphera

I don’t remember when it was. I don’t remember where I left you. It seemed for a moment that I had left you on a plane from Bukavu to Cairo. Don’t you think it was before that? Maybe it happened when I purposely ignored you. It was about nineteen years ago. It was the time I created you.

You sent strong signals to make me seek you. Did I only want to look after you? Even invisible, you took up all my space. The weight of your emotions, beneath your veil, was too heavy for my light heart. You tried to get back into life, to no longer be a ghost. You even apologized. You tried to cheat me, making me believe that you were not what I thought, that nothing you and I saw really happened.

My little ghost, it is impossible for you to change the past, to change yourself; because you belong to the past. It is impossible for you to deny it. Just as it is impossible for me to deny you.

I ignored you so well that I forgot you during my teenage years. When my mind set itself free from educational frames, you sliced yourself into that very free space. Then, I drowned you in alcohol. I burnt you with cigarettes. I locked you in luggage sent to lost places in the world. I spoiled you in strangers’ bedsheets. After all of it, you still insist and leave your mark. You name yourself as the only source of my sadness and the only cure for it. You invite yourself into my thoughts as an excuse for all my bad behaviors and harsh words. You glorify my sensitivity as if it were your own creation. You are nothing in my present, yet you are all that I am today. You were the beginning of my life and the end of the submission I chose. You sacrificed your innocence for my future. You surrendered your talents and potential, thinking they were not welcome in this world. You flew high in a sky that you invented—one that looks like you, one meant to protect us. You dived deep into a depth that only you and I know. This depth is still my shelter today.

If only I could join you twenty years ago, I would have brought you into the ocean and into the sky. I would have created a wide, transparent, and strong bubble where you could see without being seen, where you could be yourself without judgment, fear, or calculation. Forgive me for having ignored you, rejected you, and misunderstood you.

It is impossible for me to deny you. You are me, and I am you. You are a part of me—the smallest, most fragile part. Let me welcome you so that we can live in peace, so that you no longer haunt me, and so that I no longer hate you. Don’t hold it against me because I moved forward without you. I will value you for what you are, no more and no less. I will set you free from your condition as a ghost. Please, stay in your child’s role, and let me take the adult’s role. I know what you didn’t know. I have the power you didn’t have. Let me take care of you. So that one day, you can look at my children growing up with the safety you missed. So that one day, you can rest in their smiles.