Walk with me.
It is July 2022. The very first day of July, actually. Exactly one week since we laid Dad's body to rest. Funny, 2 years on, it is still a fight within myself to say "body".
Everything is still raw. His absence all too real. The guilt does not help either, compounded by the guilt of having to leave my Mom and brother at the family home with a fresh mound of dirt to wake up to every morning.
But I am my own revenue driver, and my bills need to be paid. So work, we must.
I do not remember much about the day I took this picture, July 1st, 2022.
The good folks of @weareparable and @manyattascreens are hosting this wonderful event, Love Letters to Cinema. I do not remember it, but I know it is wonderful as I have the pictures to prove it - I am the one taking those pictures.
There is something @abelmutua says rather often: "Timing ya Mungu ni mzuri, lakini timing ya Shetani... MARIDADI!"
Let me ask you: When was the last time you saw a bowl of fresh razor blades just lying around? When? Me? Not once before, nor any other day since this first day of July 2022.
Grief has this nigh-hypnotic ability to make you question what the point of this existence even is. And oh how powerful it is in that hypnotism.
So here I am, in the thickest of griefs, welcoming my work as a distraction. Yet the enormity of the grief will not allow me to escape its clutches even for the shortest of moments.
And then.
And then.
A bowl of razor blades. Just there. Some even still encased in their paper packaging. And the one blade just... there.
The timing.
Maridadi.
I flirt with the thought.
Heavily. Intimately. Passionately.
Then my mind wakes up to the camera in my hand.
I raise it to my face, release the shutter. Almost as though to retake my thoughts.
Photography may have saved my life this day.
2 years on, I had to look for this photo again today.
I am fine. I had the most delicious burger for breakfast, so I promise you, I am fine.