Apart, Speaking – Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann

I

At the kitchen table of the Victorian house I share with two flatmates, I watch you finely slice garlic and flat-leaf parsley. It’s a summer afternoon with no wind and the backyard walls burn white. 

My second year of film school stretched out before me. And you, Giuseppe, are here for a fortnight, sourcing succulents for your family’s Mediterranean plant nursery.

You heat olive oil in a pan and say the trip is an excuse to see me. I met someone a few months ago and wanted to work with him, so I restrain myself on the wooden chair. You respect my control. I admire the marvel that is you, 13,000 kilometres from where we first met.

A simple pasta you make, can’t remember which, but it takes 20 minutes short compared to the mchuzi, curries and wot I grew up on; it’s the first time I see parsley used as an ingredient and not a garnish. 

In the mornings, I swim then walk over to where you’re staying. Your body is a sculpture, you say and with this, I succumb and cast a shadow on the relationship I have once you leave.

Crown Street, Cape Town, two decades ago.

Our story is intermittent, spanning 20 years: a couple of years of silence, then a thinking-of-you, a work trip, and even if just for an instant, our worlds collide again.

I first meet the intensity of your eyes two years earlier, on the edge of the dance floor. Amsterdam, the 14th of February. I’m 18 and out with a friend to look for love at MelkWeg, a nightclub I later discover means “Milky Way” in Dutch. 

The timbre of your voice hides your softness. You stretch words, dash over others, transport me back and forth through time, new worlds born within me. 

Five years my senior, you’re a writer, intellectual, and plant guy. I try to impress you with words, but fall short. Our dates, dinners in restaurants: we sip martinis, amaretto, and, after our deliberations, circumambulate Amsterdam’s cobbled streets as the trams peter out.

The morning after the first time I stay over, you kiss my cheek then leave to trade tulips. In the pale winter morning light, in a lilac cotton tunic you lent me to wear, my reflection, with the unfurled bed behind me, beside the curiosity of what lies ahead, my image in the mirror strikes me. Never before, or after, have I looked as beautiful.

Another morning, you’re agitated, your responses short. I dress but hope you’ll stop me, I walk into my first winter snow, take photos and write about it afterwards: the love bite on my arm is the only thing that proves you exist, or at least existed, in my life.

The following winter, we meet briefly. Neither of us lives in Amsterdam anymore. I have a boyfriend. We rent a room, not as I assume for the night, but a few hours. We say goodbye on the street, heavy at my shoulder is my bag with unpacked, carefully curated outfits for our sojourn. 

Months later, I email you what I’d written while walking through the snow and include some photographs I’d taken of my younger sister. You reply: I looked at you walking away that very same time. Thought ‘last time I see this black lady, she walks out in such a gorgeous white.’ You were young but so big, I sensed no future, only present. Your photos are brilliant, that must be your little sister, Yuna? Tell her a crazy Italian once lost his cool for you and your red skirt.

Then, a year later, Cape Town: in search of cacti, we pierce vast, dry landscapes on empty highways.

In my late twenties we meet in Rome; in my early thirties, in London. In between, I collect succulents and plant them in my mother’s garden.

Your island was never really an option, yet my spirit has travelled there many times. I warm my body on a boulder above the waves, sink my mouth into figs, siesta by your skin, golden pulp of peaches slip on our fingers, aperitivo on a terrazza within an endless twilight. 

Fantasies lived so long they become memories. 

Twenty years after we first met, I live in Nairobi, but I’m in London for a friend’s wedding, and suddenly: Philippa, do you copy? I haven’t been to the UK since I saw you last. I am going to Manchester for a conference. I’ll stay a couple of days. If the stars align in all the right ways, you are still in the country, and if you feel like going up north. I’ll be there. Would be great to see you.

Strangely, Yuna, my sister lives there now. I had already considered a quick visit to see her. She laughs: finally I’ll meet the guy whose name was your hotmail password for years. Even my boarding school friends knew his name.

The stars align. It’s brief. A promenade, an unremarkable meal in an acclaimed restaurant. I feel little need to impress you, after all, to do that with you, a professor now, is a tall order. I am cautious, bridle my excitement, for you always escaped my grasp, always left me some mess to clean up, smoothed it over with words when you reappeared. 

You apologise for your prior actions, share glimpses of your childhood, surprisingly it’s too much talking for my liking. My probing reveals you’re in a relationship and my interest sinks. Still, we share a night together and I am unsure of how I feel in your arms.

Later you write to me when I’m in Kinshasa. We agree to speak when I return to Nairobi. You offer to send your latest essay contemplating the universe. 

On the phone, we laugh about not having enough shelves for our books. Then I decide to be brazen. Blunt. You listen: maybe it’s my sensitivity that attracts you to me, but it seems you don’t want to risk coming close, so you use career and geography as excuses. 

Out loud, you weigh the pros and cons, handle it maturely; admit that losing control with me scares you, and suggest spending significant time together. I do not disagree – but I refuse if you’re in a monogamous relationship.

Inwardly, I question if you prefer fantasy to reality. Secretly, I wonder if women like me, Black women with hair that tangles and traps your fingers in knots, are for nothing more than flings in faraway lands.

Your book arrives. I send you a thank you. No response. I suggest speaking. Silence. I try another time or two, then tell you to never contact me again unless you can offer me an honest friendship or a bona fide, romantic relationship.

In Cape Town, all those years before, I’d written: what were we driving towards, what were we leaving behind, didn’t I realise I wouldn’t find you again?

II

I am almost 40 now, single, living in Nairobi. A family of my own is something I have long longed for. It’s February; the grass has turned yellow, and the sun beats down on my small house.

I write prose, avoid the abyss that poetry demands of me, I dream up films, paint, work as an astrologer and psychic medium. Wedged between meetings, I pick sunflowers and herbs from the garden for lunch. My cupboards are bare so I decide on a simple but delicious pasta and I think of you. It’s been a year of silence, but you are not far from my mind.

I wash chives, mint, rucola and revel in the flair and elegance of the zucchini flower. My palm crushes garlic cloves with the flat end of my knife; the sensation of rendering something so resistant to change – suppliant, satisfies me. 

I place the cloves in the pan without slicing them – an act of defiance, a reminder that garlic is the composer of this piece. The oil’s certainty thins under the heat. I call on garlic’s magic to infuse the sauce; its edges turn brown. I snip the rucola leaves from their stalks, risk cooking them, and add them in. I’ve only just begun to like rucola again. I used to crave it – once lived somewhere without it, begged someone to send me bags of it. I was pregnant then – and then suddenly, I wasn’t.

The rucola reduces, turns dark cyan, fusilli bounce in boiling water, and coconut milk replaces cream. The sauce dries up fast. 

Why do I always cook on high heat? I lower it. The garlic is soft; golden.

I ask myself, was I too drastic? Do you still think of me as I do you? I know I do not love you, but yet I feel there is a doorway we could step through into a galaxy untraversed, if only you’d stay for a while….

I remind myself to see only what was and what is, rather than what we could be. 

I sit down on my crimson living room carpet, give thanks to those who contributed to the meal: the farmers, shopkeepers, transporters, my clients. I honour the vitality of the earth, the wealth of the garden behind me. 

Sahtein, bismillah, buon apetito.

III

Between writing, I swim. 

At the bottom of a childhood friend’s garden, the pool is surrounded by a hedge. The family is away, pervasive is their absence.

Then the emptiness fills with recollections of moments spent here as a child, a teen; gatherings in my twenties and thirties arrive in translucent layers, bushes of lavender blend into rosemary, appendages to the pool house while other parts crumble; babies born into their family, elders pass over, additions, subtractions. 

The water is cold but pleasing, my body strong but aching. Venus enters the waters to subdue her longing. I submerge my head, feel fear and relief at once, channel frustration into front crawl; feels so much sadness I cannot cry. 

As I swim, I watch the slivers of light at the pool’s depth and my thoughts dissipate. Fractured light, web, weave and shift upon the dark blue tiles. 

I catch my breath, take in the garden: the red Bottle-Brush tree before me, the flowerbed full of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrows, the indigenous Croton tree at the garden’s edge. I squint and focus to see the underside of her leaves, which I claim always to be silver. The Agave’s stalk, with clusters of blossoms, reaches for the sky. 

A plethora of trees I cannot name, shake, and sway in the wind. 

In London, during a day at Kew Gardens, you remind me trees communicate with each other; a subterranean network of mycelium exchange messages through their roots. 

Trees apart, speaking. 

I push myself harder, swim more laps, remove my goggles and watch the blurred mosaic of shifting shapes. Nothing has changed, just perception. 

At home, I look up the agave. Some species live 60 years before blooming. Monocarpic; once they flower, they die. I used to like this about the agave, now I wonder how much longer till I flourish, or, have I already had my efflorescence?

A nap. I fall into a deep sleep. Yuna calls, I tell her I’m writing about memories of people that come to me as I cook. I notice I am embarrassed about nostalgia I can’t seem to shake off; that I still live in worlds that no longer exist. 

The scent of dhania takes me back to our grandmother, Cucu. Sunday lunches at her house, mixing warm Coke and Fanta with my cousins under her dining room table. 

Boiled Kartoffeln takes me to summers with our grandfather, Opa. His long apron and Hauseschuhe in their olive coloured kitchen.

Steamed fagiolini, drizzled with olive oil and lemon, to Gladys, my cousin’s nonagenarian Italian auntie, whom I stayed with when I was making a film at the coast.

Alive or dead, they are no longer here.

Yuna says she thinks of me when she cooks, that no dish of mine is ever the same: you always make up names for them. Remember one dish, boom-chaka-laka-boom? I laugh. 

I forgot this, it’s heart-warming to know somewhere beyond the dimensions of my modest home, a loved one across the world thinks of me.

IV

The nascence of these lines arrives one morning with black tea and a rolled cigarette. The sun filters through the trees at my garden gate. I ask myself, which lovers, despite the pain, opened a doorway for me to truly know the parts of myself that had not yet been born; who spurred a bitter-sweet blossoming?

V

A decade, in fact, of sporadic intimacy with men who cook to realise it’s my love language. And not just cook – cook well; know food, appreciate substance, have a passion for process, intuition, alchemy.

I mix spices, fruits, and worlds – even had a monthly supper club long ago. Cooking for others is easy; for myself, it’s hard.

I’m better at it now, but juggling clients, projects, finances, loneliness – all the sifting and sorting of my thoughts – to be with someone who remembers to make dinner, feels good. 

VI

In my mid-thirties, I live in London. Before our first date, I bathe in herbs, massage my naked body in sacred oil then hurry through the pale blue autumnal afternoon on Green Lanes towards you, Faisal. 

After a Turkish dinner, we stroll along a tree-lined path. You stop, turn to me, and beneath the full moon, you kiss me.

Later, on a bench in Highbury Fields, you show me photos of your family. I almost go home with you, remember? At the tube station, I stop myself, turn back to you, stop myself again, then walk away. 

You nurture saplings and avocado seeds, never compliment me nor share your feelings for me, but you massage my feet when I put them on your lap, make me mujadara, musakhan, salata falaheih, kebsa, and falafel.

Our first night together, you wake up every hour, head to the bathroom, stand by the toilet with nothing to offer, return to bed, wake up again and so it goes. 

You appear calm, but you are never at rest. How can you when you grew up under occupation, had an opportunity to leave when you were young but your entire family still lives there, and returning is not a viable option?

We have a three-year-on-and-off-again tryst. You are mysterious, or rather, secretive. Each time you cannot give me the commitment I long for, I delete your number. 

Before I leave London for Brussels, I have the incessant urge to call you. I push it away, give my plants to old friends and new ones – like Ali, the Sierra Leonean security guard from the building next door. It’s been almost a year without you, but each time I hand over a pot, I know it’s you I should be giving it to. Plants I propagated over the winter, many from cuttings I took from you last summer.

In the back of a diary, hidden under a pile of books, I find your number. We spend my last night together and drink coffee together in the morning. I give you my treasured cups, glasses, a large oval platter that is perfect for laying injera and serving shiro, dorowot, kitfo, that a dear friend, now deceased, gave me when she left London. 

We take a photo at the steps of the tube, both of us smiling. 

Somehow, we manage to keep in touch without either of us running away. I visit a few times, sometimes for work, this time, it’s just to see you. It’s the end of Ramadhan, you never fast, but you want to make Ka’ak al Eid. You retrieve a black moleskin book from the shelf near your desk. In it, in your certain-uncertain script, are recipes recited by your mother back home in Ramallah. 

It’s been decades since I baked. I watch you measure flour, condensed milk, sugar, salt, your cream hands sprinkle cinnamon, then mix and knead. Your thumbs flatten rolls of dough, you press the date paste in, I envelop it, make the edges meet, mould it into a circle, one I sculpt into a heart for you. 

Eid Mubarak Faisal.

The following winter, I visit London. Soon I will leave Europe, return to Kenya for good. I hadn’t planned to see you when I booked my train, but we had started talking again so I drop my bag at my friend’s, anticipation and trepidation pace my steps to yours for dinner. After we eat, you ask me to stay over. I practiced saying no, but say yes.

If we cannot be together in the way I want, I wish we could then be friends, but our bodies are magnets, and in the darkness and in the light, parts once apart are now whole. 

New Year’s Eve on your sofa; you with prosecco, me with baby champers. I dance, you watch. We share our hopes for the year ahead: my new life back home, you, leaving your job. 

One day flows into another, we walk for hours, and in the still and silence of the night, our hands sleep intertwined as our black, curly hair interweaves, and within this darkness, the roots of our two trees slowly entwine. 

Mornings, Fairuz’s ballads fill your living room. I boil tea with mint leaves as you showed me. We watch David Attenborough, my hands within yours. I read the novels on your bookshelf, glance up from time to time as you prepare lunch, dinner, breakfast. 

No matter how large the expression of my feelings; desire, or anger, you never quake, never turn away. 

You remove the ruby jewels from pomegranates, I pull out my camera. Light etches into darkness. I embed the memory on film. Push my fear aside, ask if I can photograph you and in black and white, I capture the regality of your nose, and in another image, the warmth and depth that lies at your eyes. 

Ten days together. 

United now, separate from here on out.

The night before I return, you end it. I try to dissuade you, then walk to see a friend. The moon, full, mocks me. When I return, you’ve made salmon. We eat in silence.

In the morning, you gift me za’atar in a clear Tupperware box, sourced by your sister from the best blender in the West Bank. You accompany me to St. Pancras. 

In the taxi, you tenderly caress the edges of your scarf and watch the world pass you by. At the Eurostar terminal, I cry onto your red keffiyeh. You rub my back and whisper: it will be ok.

I return to Brussels then fly to Kenya. In my suitcase is the za’atar mixed with marjoram, oregano, thyme, salt, sesame, sumac. 

I recollect, by decree of the Israeli Agricultural Ministry, it is illegal to forage the indigenous herb in Palestine. I understand it is another way to eradicate your country’s identity by severing your relationship to your food, land, culture, history. 

Grandmother, grandfather, child, prohibited from continuing tradition.

I use the za’atar sparingly over a year, about as long as it takes to remove you from within me. 

I cut all my hair, an attempt to excise connection to you.

One morning, I scribble: I bury my hair in the roots of your house. Something I heard in my dreams last night. 

VII

Flashes of copper puncture an obscure night sky. War in your world erupts – Gaza, an inferno. Babies, mothers, fathers, die by the tens of thousands. Decimation, starvation. Genocide. In the West Bank, escalated raids, expulsions, killings.

Use the za’atar or preserve what is left? How to consume something so precious sparingly? 

Hold tight to life or flow with no fear of an end?

When I sprinkle it on my food, I bless the people of Palestine, your land, your olive trees. I pray for those alive, those bereaved, those hopeful, hopeless, dead. 

With the last spoon between my thumb and finger, I try to feel nothing, to trust the land will renew itself, but how, when almost everything has been lost? 

You said it would be ok, but it is not.

Occasionally, I text to check on you. You reply. You don’t cook as much, find it hard to enjoy food when you know your people are being starved. To watch this all on a screen thousands of miles away, apart from your family, the dread that any day now, it could be them, and still you have to exist and make a living in this world as the perpetrators remain unpunished – unimaginable. 

Last night I called. It’s been several years since we spoke. I am reminded that I love the sound of your voice. It’s not as effervescent as before, it’s deeper now, reminds me of mountains that tower over boundless land. 

Something else I adore, the pacing of your sentences; some of your words retain the Palestinian intonation, others have succumbed to the English inflection. Your accent embodies your story; your heritage as well as close to two decades in the UK. It carries too Britain’s historic complicity in the ghastly events that unfold now. Plus, I forgot our banter weaves politics and human rights with jokes; we right the wrongs of the world and punctuate it with laughter. 

However strange this sounds, you feel like someone from the same place as me, someone I grew up with; like family. I know now you’re not the partner I need, but for some reason, and I don’t have this with many people, my love for you is unconditional.

The time passed is safe enough to check in once in a while, and the geographical distance (I am sure you agree) maintains a barrier to keep us from merging, from finding home once again at the beginning of all time, when all that exists is silence and peace.

VIII

Another swim. I notice the rambling roses, the pink forget-me-nots. I close my eyes, turn my head to the sun and reflect on my life of introversion and writing, music and movies, studying astrology charts and entering the innermost lives of others. The sessions are phone calls, we never see each other’s faces but through the darkness of my closed eyes, I connect to them. Sometimes, loved ones who have passed over share messages through me; often, they say they see their past mistakes in a new light. 

Yesterday, a client says for days he’s been feeling the presence of his deceased dad, who’s been gone 30 years. The day before, a young mother shares that she feels the ubiquity of her baby that passed away, she asks him for signs, gets them, doubts them, and wants to know if what she feels is true. 

My ability to read other people’s lives, but not my own. 

Parallel worlds exist at once.

Entering and switching between worlds, I ask myself if my life is whole or fragmented. Nothing to link them besides myself, nowhere to put my thoughts except these pages. 

IX

Sunday afternoons, as a late lunch cooks slowly on the stove, I pick flowers from the garden to adorn the nooks of my home; today, I find the Red Hot Poker, some orange Cosmos, Monstera leaves, a pink Anthurium. My eyes catch sight of the germanium bush. I cut a stalk and scan it, then print the image. I darken the background with a black marker, and the plant’s structural magnificence comes to the fore. I scan it again, zoom in and admire the leaves’ spine and the webs that emanate from it. 

I print the image, paint the background in gold, find an old frame, encase the new creation, place it beside my bedroom window.

Dusk arrives, rust edges the horizon: the trees, dark silhouettes.

X

Etienne, I still dream of you; last night’s dream was so vivid that throughout the day, I feel you are near me. 

I’d known you for some years before; I’d frequent your restaurant as it was close to where I lived. You seemed like the perfect partner for me, but you were attached, so though we chit-chatted, I kept my space. Then, four years later, once I had settled back in Nairobi, we bump into each other and you share you are divorced now and co-parenting. 

Our second date happens suddenly; it’s Saturday night, just before midnight, we meet late. You’re travelling the next day and have errands to run, you’re hungry and all that’s open is a fast food chicken joint in a petrol station. 

Midnight strikes, it’s the first of the month, a few days before your birthday, I wish you a happy new month, happy birthday in advance and with your chicken drum sticks, I toast to the beginning of our lives together. I say things that make you shy but I see they move you. It seems you feel what I feel – the speechlessness when love arrives at your faithless feet. 

And beneath fluorescent light, beside the parked cars blasting bad electro, under the clouds that obscure the evening stars, we fall in love. 

The silence lingers between our sentences; you invite me over for a tisane, and your cavernous home embraces me: the dark wooden floors, the single glow at your dimly lit kitchen, your bed neatly made on the floor, the orange warmth of your bedside lamp. The kettle boils beside our first kiss. 

You lie on your side, your cup of chamomile tea between your hands. As I place mine on the bedside table, I recall many indigenous cultures claim herbs and plants hold memory, intelligence, magic. 

You play with the string of your tea bag tied around the cup handle and say, it feels like I’ve known you before. Many lives, we’ve spent together, and now we’re meeting again.

I know, I reply. 

Your skin is soft, your body darker than mine. Muscular, your chest grows no hair. You are slightly smaller than me but your body next to mine is sublime. 

It is with you I want to spend my life with but it is strange to sleep beside another. I had also grown used to Faisal. I focus on how it feels to have my hand on the pillow, your hand on my hip, my hand on the pillow, your hand on my hip…through your window, the sun rises behind the Acacia and slumber eventually comes.

From then on, I sleep through the night. Like me, you are from many worlds. I feel truly understood and loved by you. We talk till the wee hours of the morning, laugh and dance together in my living room. We are okay in the silence. We talk without speaking. 

I feel our unborn child already in my arms, as if past, present and future are merging, I share.

You agree, and for the first time in my relationships, I am at ease. I never doubt your feelings for me, nor fear you will leave. I see forever with you – not because it’s what I want, but because it lives in the ineffable between us, in the words we’ve spoken.

I do have a fear, I can’t shake – that we don’t have long together, that you will be taken from me. You are more than a decade older than me, so I figure it’s my own stuff; my deep fears of the people I love most, dying. 

The short rains arrive and I observe you prepare steak, on another occasion, tomato sauce for pasta. You cut the top and bottom of the tomatoes, broil them in a hot oven with garlic cloves, take them out, wait for them to cool, peel their skin, heat a pot with olive oil, crush them, stir in the basil, boil Barilla spaghetti #3, serve it with plenty of parmesan – just as I like it.

We find a rhythm between togetherness and separation. Mornings, with our palms open skyward, we pray: bismillah irahman iraheem…our father, qui est aux cieux…Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grâce…

Then you always pray like this: God, thank you for bringing her to me. Protect our love. 

Weekends spent by the ocean and in the darkness of a hut amongst the trees, beneath the mosquito net, our legs intertwine. 

The faraway shrill of the Colobus. Your hand at the base of my back, you love and cry like a goddess, you whisper. I slide through and into you; heart beats finding song. 

Sounds of the forest among and within us, crickets chirping; we are the trees, the ants, the bark, the beetles, the soil, the dust that births the cosmos anew. 

Days later, I say something you do not like. You return the plant I gave you for your birthday, it is now drooping, almost life less; ailing. I apologise, want to work through it, I give you space, call you after five days, a week…ten days. 

You break up with me on the phone. Months later, I bump into you and you are shockingly mean. My head, my heart cannot reconcile you whom I loved, to your words and actions.

XI

Later in Kinshasa, I accompany Louise to a Lebanese supermarket. There they have everything one would want from the Levant: halloum, dried molokhia, pomegranate molasses. I buy bags of dried chamomile flowers packaged in plastic, leave some with Fanny, take a couple back to Nairobi. Six months the chamomile resides in my drawer from Lebanon, to Kenya, via Congo. 

I remind myself when I think of someone, they send a message. Or, like yesterday, I thought of a client for weeks, then bumped into her. But no matter how much I feel you, how much I miss you, you never reach out. 

In my sleepless, moonless nights, when I remember even the stars above are dead, grief rises, reveals its blurred face, I reach out to touch it, my hand slips through. I roam the walls of my house in darkness to lure sleep. I smoke, steep chamomile in hot water, and at the edge of my bed, I hold my cup with two hands and speak to Chamomile’s flowers, ask them to travel to the moments with you locked in time, to the promise never fulfilled, to our souls left entwined, to that night and all nights. I pray like this: may your magic touch his lips, slip down his throat to his chest, to soften his heart to mine. 

When sleep comes, we meet, I ask for you to return Etienne, but you turn away, each time, each time you turn away.

The anguish of the world meets me, too. Lebanon’s neighbours declare war. I no longer speak to Chamomile’s flowers of your love that did not remain. I pray instead for the hands that nourished and the Lebanese soil on which Chamomile flourished. I whisper blessings for those who had to flee, those who had to remain.

XII

For dinner, I make dal and crush cardamom, open her shells, carefully pick out the seeds, grate ginger, onions, garlic, add berbere. My gaze focuses on a photo above my stove, of the view from my studio in Amsterdam when I was 18 and wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. 

I pick up your forgotten writing off the shelf, Giuseppe. Your opening catapults me into and amongst the vastness of the universe that is both awesome, hostile, unfathomable. I read the planet Venus has an atmosphere of 450 degrees centigrade; her poisonous gasses make human life unsupportable, deadly. All this science is distant to my archetypal understanding and intuitive sense of Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, art, money, relationships, pleasure, fertility. 

Venus: hospitable and antagonistic.

How to reconcile the two? 

Science explains how planets orbit, why the moon appears to change shape, but if one does not know that, do they know the moon any less? 

My experiences of you three; Giuseppe, Faisal, Etienne versus, you as you really are. 

Illusion, truth, fact, fable. 

But what is not fact, is still real. 

Giuseppe, something else speaks to me in your writing – you remark that humans believe they gain power by categorising things. You say it reveals more about the cataloguer: of their limitations, desires and weltanschuang than it does of the things they classify. 

We name to order chaos. We want to happen to life, life does not happen to us, so we classify a cosmos we have no control over, a space we cannot live in. 

Am I doing the same in these lines, claiming higher knowledge, categorising distant satellites to feign ownership for fear they are long lost from my embrace or that they never will belong to me?

I wash, dry and toss the butter lettuce, sprinkle salt, olive oil, then balsamico, as Francesca showed me. 

I long to see how you look now Giuseppe, I find a photo of you on the nursery’s social media – a month ago, at a flower expo in Holland. I zoom in on your face, am reminded of your gorgeous dark hair, the shape of your eyes; fine, brown, lash-rimmed. 

I want to tell you that you are in my thoughts and in these words. 

My thumb hovers over the like button. 

The dal has cooled, I squeeze lemon with my hands, remove the pips from the stew. Broad strokes, deal with the details later, is forever how I cook.

I eat. Swallow half a sleeping pill, take myself to bed, return to your text message from a year ago, most probably you were at that same flower expo: I am in Holland, makes me think of you, why is that? Hope you have been well. I missed talking to you. Giuseppe.

I scroll down further: things between us have not changed in twenty years, is that good or bad? I am happy our romance never got to the sort of solidity that can be broken. I still remember that skirt.

I remark to myself that this essay is not just an attempt to understand my experiences of you three, it is born too from my frustration of being between worlds. You are all no longer here, yet you still haunt me, visit me, fall upon me. If you will not return, leave me then. I, too, want to be free. 

XIII

A day later, when preparing a client’s astrological chart, I come across the Sabian Symbol for two degrees of Scorpio: a delicate bottle of perfume lies broken, releasing its fragrance – the difficulty of dealing with the past as one enters into a new realm of feelings. Old relationships may be left behind, but the memory lingers on, strong and nostalgic 

The afternoon recedes as twilight sweeps in. From the bush past my window comes birdsong. On the road behind, a heavy lorry passes, a car honks, a dog barks, a boda carries a woman and her son back home. The duka across the road plays a gospel song on repeat, God will work it. The sky turns from heavenly blue to dirty brown. This is dusk in Nairobi. 

Maybe tonight I will eat the leftover dal. But first, I will smoke another cigarette, stare through and into the trees, listen to the playlist I made with Bob Dylan and Fally Ipupa, then find the plantain that rests upon my fridge. I will top, tail, peel and slice it. Grind salt, add powdered canelle to the sunflower oil in the pan and as the alloco sizzles and browns, I will turn them delicately and remember nights in Dakar with Carmen at that low-key restaurant at the corniche. Beneath the string of red, orange and blue lights we’d watch the sea, eat fish and alloco and marvel at a twilight that lasts hours and holds the azure sky ever so gently. 

Maybe, Giuseppe, I will return to your note, a few pages into your book. You write in pencil, in your handwriting, I see: staunch ideas, flair, reticence to commit, a need to hide, a fear your emotions are unacceptable, among the all-knowing stars, distances are huge but gravity keeps it all together. I feel the pull of your star. To Philippa, with mutely enacted, only half explored but sturdy, gravity like love, Giuseppe.

I will look again at your message when I was in Kinshasa: so Philippa, I thought about writing to you a billion times and now is one of these times. Now, I do write. But when I don’t, it doesn’t mean, I wouldn’t. But still, I think you know.

As the plantain cools on a napkin, I will recollect how I bought some for you Etienne. I wasn’t with you when you made it for your kids, remember? But later you told me that staring at it in the bubbling oil, you thought to yourself: Philippa should be here with us too. 

You said you imagined me entering your block, mounting the stairs, and softly knocking at your door to join you three. 

So, perhaps, when I sit down for dinner; beneath the waning moon, the Milky Way a vast distance away, I will remember you, Etienne, and wonder, if, when you make alloco, you think of me too.

Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann is an artist, filmmaker, life coach and astrologer among many other things. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

*Image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash