#ni_nasieku

[bottled-petrichor]

Sometimes we pray for breakthrough but the miracle we receive is the strength to weather harsh days.

[bottled-petrichor]

There's a friend I have.

He makes me walk quieter through my life. We spent alot of time together and now we barely text. We're not on bad terms: we're the type to speak endlessly about nothing and then not at all for days. He's carefully structured the boundaries of our friendship. Sometimes awkwardly, by leaning away when we got too close, steering a convo in a different direction, breaking eye contact. I accept these quietly: I don't have much to add. This is one of the few relationships that I lean into, sit quietly in. He's precious, warm, grown and sweet.

I like that we're friends.

[bottled-petrichor]

I thought I had a crush on someone recently. I've debated with myself for a month whether this fondness is romantic or not. I don't feel butterflies when we spend time: he treats me like a friend. He shares his life with me in a goofy and inconsistent way. We're alike, I think I liked the me in him. I like the way he gets awkward for no reason and has an eclectic music taste. I like that we wear the same style of glasses and agree on almost everything. I like that I don't have to think alot around him and that we take mutually keen interest in each other's passtimes. Our convos are random and deep, silly and vulnerable. He's become a safe space. I guess I looked too long at our friendship, it began to make me blush. I began to wonder whether my hand would fit in his as we sat in movies and coffee shops. As we played video games and did puzzles. As we held each other through long nights, meltdowns, sad mornings, and uncomfortable conversations. I began to memorize his features, to will time slow when we laughed and hugged. His playful touching meant more.

This new feeling unravelled me. It sat uneasily between our inside jokes and late night texts. It weighted the times he called me friend and set healthy boundaries. It rang in my ears as he read, went to dinners, and celebrated with his family: lived his life apart from me. I'd began to fixate, alone, on what wasn't.

I thought I had a crush on someone recently but it didn't feel as easy and warm as I wished. I retired the feelings. I couldn't explain why but it seems I have a new fear of not being liked back. I took time off to grow, heal, paint and sing off key to my succulents. I'm not as willing to quietly carry unrequited crushes. I labelled the fondness platonic and spent an hour staring at his photos willing myself to feel nothing. I'll rearrange the furniture in this friendship, I'll return his friendliness tenfold, I'll stop studying his features and drain the bashfulness from every gaze before I return it. I will be his friend because it is frustrating to want anything more, alone.

[bottled-petrichor]

Freelancing as at November 2020

Freelancing as at November 2020

I’m applying to another NGO job, in the beginning, I turned my nose up at the unpaid gigs, a year of unemployment has worn me down. Here I am, relishing the opportunity to be exploited if it’ll get a leg in. I’m changing the date on my coverletter even though a HR lady I follow on Twitter says no one reads those. Convert to pdf and send. I reopen the “writing competitions 2021” tab and browse…

[bottled-petrichor]

See: something’s been eating me for a while, I’m naming it sloth. It’s whet my appetite for an excellence I had long forgotten

rereading things I wrote to myself because I need to remember how much wisdom God has poured out into my pen. 

[bottled-petrichor]

I like how, ever since I left home and even now that I'm back, mournful love songs at night woo the stories out of me. It's like they're finally comfortable to speak when everything falls silent and asleep. My heart resonates so deeply with the peaceful space between a spent day and an unlived one. There are no expectations here. Some reflections, aspirations, and the calm of having to neither solidify��nor fulfill these. Just me and my eclectic playlist dancing with my drafts.

Xenia Mannaseh

Suddenly doubting my music taste?

[bottled-petrichor]

My Mom recently reconnected with her Uni class of 1996 they send each other throwback photos and current ones. There's this one, this one I tried to look at but felt a forlorn fist uncurling in my chest. There stood my father, existing all those years ago as he does today: with no knowledge of me. I tried to laugh along as we spoke about our resemblance, something about sharing features began to eat at me. Something about the fact that our relation was evident began to undo me. I wished to miss him but didn't,  I had soaked myself in indifference toward him. I have imagined and tried to act out what meeting him would be like; as years go by, I fear being unaffected by it. I fear letting my younger self down: remember how I used to long for him? How I knew with an unshakeable certainty that he was who I needed to be well, whole, or atleast just a bit more ok. It seems I have outgrown this idolization. Do I miss needing him? Have all these years of healing and following a loving God eroded all my childhood expectations of him? What place would he have in my life if ever he were to step into it? Would it be better if we never met? Am I whole or do just not want to ask the painful question that's sat at the bottom of my heart.              "Why and when did you realize that you did not want me?                     What, if anything, has changed? Is now finally a good time for us? Why now? Why not later. Or never?. "  My Mom recently reconnected with her freshman class of 1991, they all say we look exactly alike. Thank goodness; I've always prayed to so take after her that no memory of you remains in me. Genetics won't let me have it though. Unfortunately.

Yikes, bro. That’s allat!

[bottled-petrichor]

Weightlessness is a crushing feeling. Once we heal from the burdens that pinned and suffocated us, we must relearn how to fly and breathe. With ease. We find ourselves tensing our shoulders because the pain of the weight has settled itself far too deep in our hearts; it's as familiar as our breath. The final act of letting go is believing that we have the healing we always craved; that this is normal now. We feel out wholeness gingerly, half-expecting to find pain like we used to. We're surprised at happiness, we listen out for the discouragement; we wait for the other shoe to drop. But moment by moment, we settle into health. We stand taller, breathe deeper and laugh to tears. We no longer remember the hurt with familiarity but with thanksgiving: we no longer own it. Peace washes out the disappointment and settles in our deepest nooks. Weightlessness engulfs us and, as we go, we soar and grow with ease.

As You Find Me- Hiilson Y & F

I really really do not miss being truly sad. 

[bottled-petrichor]

I keep thinking of all the things I wanted to do at 23. And why I didn't. Half are because I couldn't really: between lack of time, money, willpower and the courage to voice out my desire there were plenty reasons [excuses] to choose from. The bigness of my aspirations and self-doubt were the swords my aspirations fell on. I've noticed a growing fear of getting used to the quiet in my head. I miss being able to tiptoe through the cabbage patch of my goals, story drafts, half-finished poems, reviews of my most embarrassing life moments and iconic action movie scenes with the confidence that they were all equally me. I miss staring into and through everything around me as I wandered through snippets of an animation I want to draw, or dress I want to design with skills I am yet to [begin to] cultivate. I miss losing myself wholly in songs in languages I don't understand without doubting whether I truly [have the right and range to] like them. I am about to make a list of things I am keen on experiencing and achieving at 24.  Should I set the goals unachievably high, shelve and forget them, bring them out periodically to feed my [perceived] inadequacy and then put them in my brimming box of mementos? I may have to break out the good washi tape for these dreams. 'Take time to really lay them out in a messy, color coded and keyed mind map. Maybe then all the me that had been silenced by fear, disappointment and lethargy will begin to buzz once more. If I achieve nothing I set to, may I at least have peace in knowing I stepped beyond thinking about them.

Phew chile

Has a project due tomorrow and their Mum is the client but is not panicking: is this what it feels like to peak?

[bottled-petrichor]

I like poetry, I haven't written much of it in years. I once lived in and for poetry, literature and all the magical and delicious worlds that words create.  I find that the thing about poetry, though, is it always made me thirsty for answers.  What does it's penner look like; are they a dreamer like me, is their heart broken or wild, do they like poetry too but find it difficult to write until they feel the world is sat right? Like I do? I liked this girl. I haven't spoken about her in years, She was I and I was equal parts in awe and deeply resentful of her. Her mind would spin these lovely little magical and delicious worlds. I grew to understand that the thing about her, though, is that she had an ever expanding appetite for stories. She was brown and broken, she was a dreamer like me, she was naiive and wild. She liked poetry and found it difficult to write until she felt the world was stood right. I did. I thought I had left her at nineteen when I lay down my expectations of life, love and myself. I  threw out the memories of the poetry and literature: the worlds I loved to lie in and create. I silenced my thirst for answers by believing they only birthed more questions. I stopped dreaming, took time to heal and taught myself to sit- to be- still. I put down my pen and slanted the way I felt the world did.  For years, I laughed the same way and woke and slept with an emptiness in my chest. I wondered if this was what it felt to be whole, grown, calm. But my heart and hands began to ache. I tried running, singing and studying: I felt emptier the harder I worked to be whole. So I sat and wrote. Everything between prayers and fears, songs and bitter cries poured out. And from within my heart I heard, over and over, "my words make the world right; my words will make the world right".

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses 

Tho’ much is taken, much abides.

[bottled-petrichor]

I have asked you so many times what kind of a life you want to live. You said "sometimes I don't want to live at all. Sometimes I think my life would be better if I were someone else". Well you can't be. I guess this is it. I have asked myself how to love me a bit more, better, longer. I said "sometimes I think I am the most wondrous creation, sometimes I wish to go home to my creator." I want to just live life without over-thinking it. I want light breaths and full days. I don't want every moment to hang so heavily with crisis and anxiety. I want to be what everyone else sees me as.  I have asked myself so many times what kind of person I want to be. I think, me, but more. Much more. And also, in some respects: less. I have finally chosen me and isn't that the best choice to have made?

I’m having a breakdown but it’s internal and I can hear something breaking: I hope it’s not my mind.

[bottled-petrichor]

If I am what stood in my own way, if I am the war I waged within myself, if all I needed to do was cease striving, then I have ceased. I'm no longer simultaneously tearing myself down and picking up the pieces. I am no longer the voice that encourages then suffocates with doubts, worry, anxieties. If I have to choose to be of one mind, then I choose to love myself. I'm on my way now, I'm resting in peace now. I am strife free.

A lily of the valley.

Black Lives (Do and Will Always) Matter.

[bottled-petrichor]

Ask me again if I love myself. Ask me again please: I finally have an answer that we would both like.

[bottled-petrichor]

If you do something enough times; you get pretty good at it, I say to myself as I note how skilled I am at procrastinating and living with a feeling of breathlessness and lag.

Simi Jams

Phew Chile

[bottled-petrichor]

Ugh.

Here stands 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success vehemently doubting herself, her creator and love itself. 

[bottled-petrichor]

Last year, my Uncle, Aunt, cousins and I were brainstorming this idea. It was all banter, insight, jokes, engineering and tech things I did not understand so they explained it to me. They're making it happen a couple months later. It will be big. It awed me: I have never been this closely involved in the process of changing the world- even small pieces of it. It made me feel like my doubts were a tent I hide in to avoid working- failing, hurting.  Last year, as my cousin and I were walking home, I told her of this story I want to write: she said "can't wait for the first draft". I know this will be the year I'll start my process of changing however small a slice of the world. It's the precipice and I am more afraid than anything.

Character building Secretary duties