Her skin was dark like mocha, a rich hue of coffee brown. In my eyes, Kachi was adularescent, and when she smiled, showing dazzling teeth framed in plump lips, it sent a jolt of electricity into the air, and even Mother Earth stopped to marvel at that smile. She had the prettiest brown eyes, the daintiest little nose, the fluffiest afro which encircled her face like soft black clouds. I’d told Kachi that she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I told no lie.

 

She was dark.

 

Dark, dark, dark, like the darkness that took her.

 

And her voice – I still hear her voice, but only when I am asleep. It’s when I’m dreaming, when I have nightmares, that I hear her. As opposed to years ago when her voice was like honey on my tongue, her voice stings like tangy udara  and  chokes my lungs like fumes of palm oil being bleached. So every night, just before sleep takes me, I say a silent prayer hoping to sleep sans dreaming, because Kachi appears in my dreams, and I do not want to see her.

 

I would do anything to stop hearing her. Kachi, who had the softest voice. Kachi, whose voice I once loved. Now, her voice replays  in my head like a broken recorder, but it’s different from how she sounded for most of her life. Not soft sounds or hushed tones as she whispered at night. Not the giggles that gave her voice a bright undertone. She is shrieking, she is yelling.

 

She is screaming, “No! No! Let me go!”

 

Oh God! The dreams. They reach out to me with clawed fingers, like branches of a tree, and clench my chest so much that it hurts to breathe, to stay alive, and I beg the darkness to take me.

 

I’m the one that should be let go.

 

Let me go.

 

###

 

Kachu told me she had nightmares of an old witch stretching out wrinkled hands to kill her in her sleep, and I would laugh and tell her that it was a childish fear, that she would outgrow it when she grew up.

 

I guess the joke is on me, for she never got to grow up, and now I’m the one stuck with nightmares.

 

###

 

My best friend, Nnenna has been begging me to consider applying to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she currently is in her first year. I don’t have the money, is what I tell her. She could beg her uncle to sponsor me, she’d say. He’s the one putting her through school, and he wouldn’t mind lending a favour to her best friend.

 

Best friend.

 

How can two words give me such a thrill a few years ago, yet seem like such a burden now?

 

The chasm that divides Nnenna and I grows wider and wider each day, burying what’s left of our friendship. Nnenna has big dreams – she’s involved with political and human right campaigns at her school for peace, for equity, for change – and it’s crazy to think that I had such dreams too, but my passions are currently lying six feet under with the body of my sister. She speaks in a more polished manner than I do, and although her words are still heavily accented, her speech doesn’t raise as much eyebrows as mine would. “Are you Igbo?” some would ask when we speak, but with different expressions – shining, inquisitive eyes at Nnenna; wrinkled, turned-up noses at me.

 

She says a campaign against female genital mutilation is being organized, and it could be extended to our village so no one has to go through what we went through; I wonder why they are campaigning now, why they didn’t come two years ago. Maybe Kachi wouldn’t have died. Nnenna would then fault the network for her brief silence while she chooses her next words carefully, so she doesn’t say something that would aggravate me, and would instead try to entice me to come to UNN with stories of it being fun, meeting new people, eating spicy abacha at joints.

 

What she doesn’t know, however, is the reason why I don’t want to be around people, to fraternize – me. I can conceal my erratic behaviour in my room, but what happens when I’m clustered with three other girls and I have a nightmare in the middle of the night? Would they understand? Would anyone really understand?

 

Nnenna once told me that she understands how I feel, but it’s only the version of me she sees, or rather, the one I allow her to see. Would she understand my sweat soaking the mattress on a chilly Harmattan nightt, jumping up through a nightmare and trembling like a drenched squirrel, saying, “No don’t take her! Leave her for me. Don’t take her!” and ending up having a breakdown at 3 in the morning? 

 

Does she understand how it feels to lose someone who centered your life like gravity, a sister you would’ve given up your life for? Or how it feels to relive each moment of the worst day of your life, to remember the way the house smelt of boiled meat because we were to eat Ofe Owerri with meat that day (it’s strange how we only ate meat during special occasions, but that day was anything but special)? To remember the way Kachi’s fingers clung to your body, her tears staining your shirt as she cried that she didn’t want to go? To remember how it felt shouting for your mother to come out of her room, to do something, because you’ve experienced what Kachi was about to years ago, something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, but you had no power to stop them from taking her because you were as much of a kid as Kachi was, and maybe, maybe if your mum came out, they wouldn’t take her?

 

But they took her, anyways. And they hurt her like they hurt you and your mother and most females in your community, and Kachi came back with bleeding underwear, complaining that down there hurt and hurt and hurt, and it hurt you even more to see her hurt.

 

And it kept hurting seeing her wound get worse.

 

It kept hurting when they said it was inightmares. 

 

It kept hurting when they said she couldn’t survive.

 

It kept hurting when she died a week later.

 

It keeps hurting even two years later, because those memories are etched into my blood, branded in my mind as if with an iron. And I keep seeing Kachi’s face, all her faces – her sad one; her smiling one; her dead one.

 

What Nnenna can understand, however, is the painful throbbing I get between my legs, for she was mutilated too – most females in our village were – but my heart also throbs from grief, and although Nnenna may be grieving too, our traumas may be shared and similar but not the same. The more I associate with her, the more I’m taking her down, down, down the road to depression with me.

 

Down.

 

Down.

 

Down.

 

Until I drown.

 

Until we both drown.

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