Farewell, Home.

• Mariama Biro Saibou, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2015

Yesterday, a few days after the funeral, lawyers overlooking Mum’s will told me that everything she ever owned belongs to me now. A thirteen-year-old.

This paradox of freedom and captivity takes hold of me.

This bed beneath my body, that ceiling above my head, the wall with hole in it, the toilet with the broken lid, this house: it is mine. I mean, it was always mine, technically, but it was Mum’s first.

If I broke something in this house, if I purposely mistreated something, there would be consequences, and I would get into trouble.

But now...there are no consequences for shattering Mum’s favourite vase against the wall with the hole in it.

It is just the weight of my sentimental conscience to berate me for my own insolence. The internal morality Mum has instilled, no longer Mum herself, to check me when I step out of line. No one left to ground me or send me to my room or ban me from my favourite bookcase for a week.

That frail, unearthly creature, Great-Aunt Clementine, can do all that now, of course, I suppose. But that’s different.

If I’d done something wrong, and Mum was angry with me, I would always trust she’d forgive me eventually, I could trust in her unconditional love.

But, staring up at that ceiling in my bedroom, I realise I can trust in no one’s love anymore. I will always be on guard, constantly rehashing what I say and how I act. I don’t have a parent to do that for me anymore. No one to remind me of the expectations, I have to remind myself from now on.

Great-Aunt Clementine is doing a ‘generous thing’ by taking me in. Therefore, I will appreciate her kindness by being on my best behaviour–eternally.

And I’m angry. Don’t I have the right to be?

I could break and burn every ornament in this house, and no one would blame me. No one would judge me; I know I’d only be pitied as 'the girl who couldn’t quite take it anymore’. And wouldn’t that be the perfect release? Freedom, at last.
To watch your life, belongings and all the worthless trinkets you’ve collected over the years, crumble to ashes?

To breathe in the smoke of your years, to scream and scream away the festering agony?

But I am sane. And that is my unrelenting captor. If I’m sane enough to justify my reasons for wanting to obliterate my home, if I am thoughtful enough to remember Mum and her belongings and her precious trinkets, I am sane enough to leave this house quietly.

To leave and never come back; to flee a solemn shadow and not a furious fire.

And so this cottage of little trinkets to piece together the ethereal leftovers of my mum–the one place I want to keep with all my soul–is being ripped away from me. Or, more precisely, I am being torn away from it.

Farewell, Home.

Bye, Mum.