letters.

how to write a love letter

I’ve only ever received one (love) letter. Written on blue aero-gramme paper with gummed edges which I licked and pressed shut, over and over again for years, so that I could feel again and again what it was like to open a letter written just for me. It was 1994, I was six years old and my father was my first clandestine love.

He was the man you know is bad for you but you’d follow to the grave. You’d bury yourself in his anger, in his jealousy and especially in the things about him that you know will end like the mzungu out there who chopped off her husband’s genitalia.

They say that for a little girl growing up, becoming a woman, has a lot to do with out growing the men you know can’t love you right. Shit.

So he came home. Our home, not his, and I followed him around for days, trying to understand this thing – which he called love, but my mother called laziness. In a world where children can’t eat the air and CareBears don’t survive hand washes and afternoons hanging in the sun by their shoulders, my father sat on her bed in his boxers and read Ludlum and cleaned Franco LPs to put under the needle, for afternoon boogey sessions – and lessons in Congolese rumba. We went out – we held hands in the big city, we looked at chocolate hearts in shop windows, we had lunch in grown folk’s restaurants and we met with friends (his friends not mine) who drank Tusker like real men had to. Show and tell – this is my daughter, yes. “This is my daughter”. My mother sat on the steps of our home, not his, waiting for the keys with a bag of red tomatoes in her lap, and frustration in her eyes.

Again. They say that the first sign of maturity is outgrowing the men who could never begin to love you the way that you need to be loved. My father was one such man. Twenty something years later I am everything that they told me a modern woman was supposed to be – confident and unsentimental (ducks don’t get wet) – but my father’s letter; I keep. In my notebook, in my purse, under the lamp when I sleep – that I have it is my only guarantee.

A letter is a calculated act. A commitment; a vow; a status update in the age before our channel surfing generation made expression an act of aggression. It’s a snapshot – an assurance that the moments you had when love felt real, and not like something you learn about from early morning radio on long commutes, actually happened.

There are a lot of things that I might never know but most nagging amongst them is what love really is. Is it what Mom did? You slave and you sacrifice and you wear yourself down into a shadow of the smallest you; you give your life, you break your back, you hope your girls will go ‘all the way to university’. Or shall we draw from my fathers eighties pop rendition – tenderness, patience, understanding, respect, compassion . . .

The knots we weave, the words we use – the hearts we break with our promises. One day you wake up tired and you scrub your fridge, and you eat a one man (well woman, really) breakfast over the sink. And you shrug your shoulders as you read old letters.

Do you remember how to write a letter?

 

 

 

Weaving alongside Dr. Mshai Mwangola News to Note, Jean Thévenet A Knotted Weave and Phyllis Muthoni The Words We Use. And for those warriors of memory like Dr. Wambui Mwangi (Laboratories Have Advanced) but especially for all all of us who are befuddled by the simplest of things.