new york

[this story ends well for you]

Landing in the united states feels like shaking hands with your bully at a high school reunion. Your face has grown smoother. Your backside has filled out. Strangers have stopped you on the streets to desire your hair. But somehow in front of this bully you become small again.

Unease ticks inside you to the rhythm of the wheels of a train you are trapped in for two and a half hours. You are waiting on your soul, waiting on your soul, waiting on your soul. This is the longest it has taken to come to you, a truth as foreboding as the grey clouds blanketing the skies over the lake in the adirondacks. 

You miss an important meeting and get surprise charges for a trip you assumed was free. The heart of a friend slips from your hands and pedestrians kick it away from you despite your chasing its trail of blood for hours. Once again, it is like your adult self has been peeled off from your core leaving the child in you naked in public.

You sleep in a deli and arrive at a party a zombie. You love on your friends because you swear you had so much love inside of you when you left nairobi you needed to give some away. You find there is nothing inside you and you run through the trees every morning until life feels like one nonstop day. 

You say over and over again it is a satanish place that takes someone’s child and returns them home in a coffin. 

All the people whose minds and souls god doodled find you and engulf you like an amoeba does food. You let them fill some of the space inside you that is empty. You never stop running. 

You find a song that loves you. You go back into the city to chase it. Twice. The city envelopes itself in heat, to keep you in or out- you don’t know. You marry the music in a garden wedding in the summer- flowers in bloom, raindrops on butterflies’ wings making the sunlight sparkle,  nyatitis littering the grass, the wind making music out of lonely Tusker bottles abandoned for the dance floor and yellow bicycles taking an afternoon nap on the lawn. During your honeymoon, the music massages your body, everywhere, promises it can love you back to yourself again. The city looks at the music’s fingers between your legs and contorts its eyebrows in want, starts to beg you to love it too. Once again, it is like high school; the most popular girl likes you, and now everyone is seated cross-legged at your feet, waiting for their turn to be loved by you. 

*Psst I am soft launching a Patreon for paying readers, in which I will duplicate okasungora pieces (because open access). If you are capable, sign up to support my work: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34932178 Thanks.