stories that I hate to remember but cannot forget

Justice is the only dew that should fall on the graves of girls whose eyes were once showrooms for dreams. Girls like Ochanya, Uwa, and the other nameless girls who cannot eat a kiss without puking, whose bodies are resistant to romance, whose moans string together into a dirge for their innocence. There’s a lady who is thinking about the politest way to tell her man to put a trigger warning on his crotch because of how it reminds her of the man who burgled her body. There’s another girl, holding coloured candles on her eyelids and its wax dripping from the corners of her eyes. She said it’s nothing serious… Just a memorial night in honour of something which died. That memory is a graveyard but not everything that dies has a tombstone by which one can lay flowers. Another girl in a see-through dress, thinks of herself as a midnight snack and asks to be eaten at a fee, but she is actually a flower which withered before the florist came by. A rose which did not have the luxury of getting a decent sniff from happy lovers. Some nights, I am one of these girls. My body is a scroll of many stories that make me want to be a snake. So, I can shed this skin together with the stories that I hate to remember but cannot forget.

Ochanya was raped severely by her aunt’s husband and his son from age 8 till she passed, due to reproductive health disease complications at 13 in 2017. Uwa’s lifeless and violated body was found in a church auditorium where she was fond of studying during the COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria.