Cries of Despair

Kamau Nosakhere || Fall 2024

I used to wonder what Life would smell like.
I wanted to roll around in the mud
I had visions of us painting our hands
Then painting our walls
Then turning our walls out
So that others can see our paint
And paint with us
I couldn't wait to be down there smelling life with all of you.
And we forget our dreams because they become ubiquitous within existence.
I was put here. Pulled here. Pushed here. Given a “gift”. 9 months before my birthday, I won. Just like all of you, I won. We won the chance to breathe. To see. To taste. To smell. To hear. To touch. To hold. To love. To be loved. The chance to have dreams. To swim. To fly.

Given the gift of seeing our families severed and disconnected. Of tasting the dust and the dung at the back of our throats after the planes fly over and drop their gift. Of smelling the stench of burning flesh as you hear your loved one scream in pain. To touch the body of one you once held, their eyes barren, tongue swollen.

Dreams will be crushed and lost to time. Wishes for freedom leading mothers to jump and swim with the fishes. Bodies flying through the sky, on the way home, stepped on a landmine.

And the love. Oh the love. You feel it don’t you? Warm and fuzzy...has it ever felt spiky? Has that love ever cut you? It comes to you as a ball of dandelion fluff and leaves through the other side as a coalescence of rusty shrapnel. There are some who never get to feel that dandelion fluff. Just chunks of shrapnel ripping at their flesh and leaving scars on their soul.

And that’s the same gift. That same gift we aren’t supposed to give back. Why are we here? To bathe together in the fires of hell? The hell we are making this world? The world is burning! It’s burning...but it’s not dying. We are. We are trudging forward through the torture of our own creation, and it hurts.

And it’s scary. I’m scared, can’t you see it in how I interact? Can’t you hear how the rusty shrapnel speaks when I open my mouth? My insides have been poisoned and infected. I had a vision of a world where I could marvel at the sunrise. Could swim under the light of a full moon. Could eat food with my family comfortably. Laughing and crying with sweet joy. I don’t laugh anymore. I don't know what it sounds like. I cry and the tears are just salty. My tongue caked with ages of pain and blood and mud. The sun just marks another day of suffering. The moon reminds me of horrors I lived through that my nightmares replicate. I don’t know if I want to be here. And I just got here. I think I’m done. I look forward to the darkness that comes after the world burns us.