If Home was A Kite
That late afternoon, I put on a grumpy brown outfit with a pair of sneakers and left my apartment with just myself and its shadow that straggled behind to Hoyt-Schemerhorn train station. The day wore the outfit of night. Through the train’s window, I savored every advert and movement with my webbed palms.
I reached my train stop and I walked out to the seashore of Coney Island, where I buried my feet in the sand and watched the sea waves pile on top of each other before sliding back to join the other part of themselves like layers of bread on a sled going down a snow-covered hill. Egrets gathered in a corner around some grains of food that they pecked before resuming their flight.
At my front was a mother whose palm laced her daughter’s. The young girl with two pigtails in a white t-shirt and jeans short, holding a rainbow-colored kite in the air twisted and playfully curved her body. Her body synchronized with the rhythm of the ocean. She and her mom moved away from the water after a while to where I sat with lines of dried tears on my face. The shrieks, screams, laughter, and the ice cream truck music from the amusement park drugged me to the past. The bleakness toyed with my current state of mind. A child, a game, a chase, a swing, and a dress that billowed in the wind like a painting in black and white. I closed my eyes to silence the whispers, the hallucinations, and the loneliness that ate me from inside like a cankerworm crawling on the wet sand.
I opened my eyes to find the young girl close to me like a shed or a human shadow. She moved her finger toward my face but my head ducked backward. It did not feel right to have someone else’s child touch me without their parent’s knowledge. She withdrew her finger and sucked on her lower lip with her face cowered. I watched her; the innocent milk that ran through her veins and how we both looked black and white in different shades of skin. My mouth tweaked but no words came out. I looked everywhere for her mom whom I found behind me, engaged in a call that had her screaming silently into the phone.
The girl looked at me and said, “I only wanted to wipe your tears. I saw you crying. Don’t you have friends? Why are you all by yourself? My mom and I come here a lot.” I watched as her lips moved like a car without breaks.
Are all kids like this? Last Sunday after church, another young girl came and sat on the chair next to mine and told me all about her family. Could they see my loneliness wrapped around me like a blanket? I thought to myself.
We both watched a thousand starlings that circled together in the Prussian expanse of the sky in silence. It blossomed into a flower garden with butterflies dancing and mounting at the crowns of blue, green, yellow, and orange flowers before the starlings flew away.
The little girl dug her legs in the sand and kicked them away. Our eyes met and I found a planet that reminded me of what home feels like. I smiled not at anyone in particular but the idea of home not being so far away anymore. She smiled back before returning her attention to the star-like kite in her right hand that waltzed in the air.
Her mother joined us with an apologetic mask, “I am sorry. Was she disturbing you? She tends to wander off every time we are at the beach.”
“Oh, not at all. I enjoyed the company.”
“Do you want to hold my kite?” the girl asked before turning and walking away hand-in-hand with her mother. I collected the kite.
I watched them leave the shore then looked back at the rope of the kite wrapped in my left palm. The kite swayed from left to right. Its tip pointed towards the ocean’s endlessness. I breathed in and out before releasing it. And I watched it sail between the surface of the ocean and the clouds.
Bibiana Ossai is a Nigerian writer and a Ph.D. Fiction student at Texas Tech University. She received the Marilyn Boutwell Graduate Award in Fiction from LIU Brooklyn. Bibiana won the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown Scholarship and others. Her works appear in African Writer Magazine, among others. Twitter: @BibianaOssai