A Visit To My Wife In The Graveyard

I pushed the old rusty gate open- three feet tall, and began to walk past a grey hound who sat forlorn beneath the inscriptions "We were once like you and you will be like us" written in flowery-italics.

Cold breezes from the uttermost trees swept across tombstones and rushes at me, swinging vigorously the muffler woven around my neck and the flaps of my black coat. Making me halt my steps momentarily. What a welcome to the abode of the dead- McKinley Graveyard. I cast my eyes to the scene of grey-slate clouds that hung just above and noticed how charged with thunderstorms it is. A menace of a fierce downpour soon to come. I pressed my lips tight and wrapped my arms around me as I gathered momentum, navigating between tombstones down to where the love of my life laid, for twenty-two years now.

I got there only to found missing, the flowers I had brought along. I retraced my steps now slowly, gazing about much too familiar tombstones for where the bunch of flowers may have dropped in my hastiness. I picked it up then return to her grave and deposited it above the withered others of time pass. Immediately, it starts to drizzle, but I fear the heavy clouds have more in store. I tucked few wisp of hairs across my head behind my left ear and pocketed my hands. And squinted to avoid the wind blowing against my face into my eyes. I had come to mark the anniversary of her death.

For a long moment, I stood at the end of her grave in silent mourning, unconscious of the thunder and lightenings that crashes against slabs of tombstones and the reckless swaying of overgrown weeds of the forgotten graves around. My gardener comes to weed Appolonia's' grave weekly. So, but for fresh sprouts, day-old mushrooms and algae and brown leaves strewn on the marble slabs about her grave. Her grave was neat. I relish a reliving delight when I realized how dignified the name "E.A Edgar-Bakare" shone, lettered by gold on the sea-blue marble.

If I had the sheer will to resist the words that my mind usually brews during moments like this. The words that evoke nothing but tears and bitter feelings. She was the one light that ever lightened my life so bright. A part of me bottled up in another entity but now gone, leaving me sullen in so cold and large a world.

Lame as she was, she made my life seems so complete and perfect. A violent rainstorm started to swirl about the graveyard, letting off screams and echoes like a demon child in bondage
Making the intensity of the downpour increase and it started to seep into my shoulder-pad and down my bare skin. I looked down at my Wellington boots and my feet seemed immovable, stuck to the wet soil and the pool that's gathering about me.

In a sudden flash of a very bright thunderbolt, crashes of thunder echoing and filtering through the expanse of the desolated graveyard. Fear evoking. Appearing right on the marble of the grave is a tiny blue bird with broken feathers lying helplessly. I wiped rain water off my brows with the back of my forearm and moved towards the creature. The rain had beat it fleece-like soft feathers and it stuck against the marble, wide apart but broken with it breast facing up. I noticed the yellow crescent on it and the teardrop that shone in it eyes which of course were raindrops. And I was no longer confused as to what the bird was.

On the first day I'll ever meet Appolonia. It was at Oxford college and I was just an african student with heavy cardigans on, pressing the freezing bones of my knuckles despite the thick gloves, wondering how am going to survive so long as, the four years required to complete my studies in business management and amusing myself by looking out the window and taking curious look at the unfamiliar white creatures.

To be e continued

(pi cture credit) (google.com)