Just Adachi

If regret is a song, then let me answer it once, low and without feathers ruffled: I do not regret you. Even now. Even as your morning song tries to unwrite our mornings. You think your sorrow is a river— it is a mirror. You polish it each dawn to see yourself as someone who once loved and lost the right to. But love was never a right. It was a branch we both landed on. That row? It was not the fall. It was your pride refusing the landing. So sing your elegy to the empty field. I have already flown not away from you, but past the story you need me to live inside. You call it regret. I call it your ego wearing mourning clothes because it could not win a fight that never needed winning. I will not match you grief for grief. Instead, I will eat the same red berry under the same sun and remember us whole— not because I am blind, but because I am not afraid of the small, broken parts. Your regret is yours to carry. Mine would be a lie. And lying to make you comfortable is the one thing I ne...

One thing no one tells you about the dead is that their smell lingers in your insides. Especially when they’re rotting. I don’t know why I insisted on going to see Auntie Carol. I still don’t know why, till today. It’s been two weeks, and her smell still hides inside me, and it's not something my perfume can handle. I’ve drowned my bathwater in Dettol and filled my room with air fresheners of all sorts. Yet the smell lingers. And the worst part is her face. Every moment, her darkened, swollen face flashes before my eyes, and it takes everything in me not to puke again. I'd vomited on the day I saw her. And again I ask myself: why did I go to Awka? Why didn’t I just wait at home like everyone else? Auntie Carol was the sweetest auntie. The life of the party. A breath of fresh air. The person you leaned on. Her smile made your day. Her singsong voice gave you sweet dreams whenever she said, "Night, night." The kindest, sweetest soul. So, when my mother called and said, ...

I am reading Igbo Worlds by Elizabeth Isichei, and I keep stopping at the names of the people she interviewed. They are names like Ogbuamazie, Odada, Amaruife, Anyanta, Okwumabua. You cannot mistake them for anything other than Igbo. They speak of a heritage untouched by Christianity or Western influence. Reading them, I feel I am hearing echoes of a world before my own. Then I think of my own name: Adachukwu Onwudiwe. Adachukwu—literally translated as God's Daighter but really means 'a child of God’s will'. It is beautiful, but it is shaped by Christianity. The Chukwu is Igbo, yes, but the naming impulse that produced it belongs to the church. Onwudiwe, though, is different. That name ties me directly to my ancestral roots. It has a story encoded in it, one that existed long before any missionary arrived. My surname, too, is the final link that still connects me to an ancestor’s story. I find myself wondering how many of us still carry such names. Not the Christian-influen...