In my heart's calendar

Malika Ndlovu

(for Iman Bongiwe Ndlovu,
born and buried 3rd January 2003)

In my heart’s calendar I mark this day. The day my instincts told me three years ago that your heart had stopped beating, setting off three days of deep shock and protective denial, until I could not ignore your silence anymore. Your beautifully articulate almost-five-year-old brother has been talking about you more than usual lately. He tells everyone he has – not had – a sister, but she died, and depending on his audience goes off into elaborate explanations of how you fell from the sky. His latest drawings of our family include you larger than anyone else. “She is big and blue like the sky, so I made her big but this paper is not big enough,” he confidently explains. He shares his dreaming of you and cannot describe a face or shape, just a certainty that it is you. I listen in quiet envy. I have been afraid, I guess, to call you back to me in this way. Afraid you will not come. Perhaps he is right. I could try his perspective. You are with us and have never left – endless and ever present as the sky, holding us in a permanent embrace across this immeasurable distance between life and death, this being in and out of our bodies. “ I love you, Mummy, and I am your alive son, my heart never stopped yet, hey?” Only I hear the relevance of his choice of words, the sore resonance of his question on this day, at this time.

28 December 2005
(from the unpublished manuscript Exits and Entries, 2005)

LitNet: 21 March 2006

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