Since the birth of human businesses, human beings have not learnt to mind their businesses — folks are always hungry to interfere in a person's private part. It's simply not advisable to meddle in other people's affairs, unnecessarily. Courtesy demands that you respect a person's decision — help if you can help, but never do because you want to make mockery of the person's intelligence.
Well, I am sounding like this because of what happened in my neighbourhood. There was a fight.
My elder sister was negotiating with a mobile seller of wears, and a neighbour, fondly called Mama Daniel, interfered, asking the seller not to sell to my sister, Elizabeth. Perhaps she was only joking.
And my sister pounced on the 40-something-year-old woman. They exchanged blows on their bodies. And my sister, who was more muscular and raging, grabbed the woman's wrapper and opened her secret. This is where everything ended and began, simple and complicated.
See this fact: my elder has been a psychiatric patient since 2006, and the entire neighbourhood and people close to us know about this. This has been a huge battle in the family, especially as the public barely have an education on the incredible intricacies of psychiatric disorders.
It appears that only I understand my sister deeply, little wonder I'm her closest friend — perhaps I'm myself psychotic. Well, telepathy and empathy are the major functional mediums available to me.
Let me tell you a little about my sister and me: My sister was the one person that processed my birth. By birth I don't mean the biological procedure; I mean something else. I mean my love for books, my love for poetry, the love that has no name. It has everything to do with water and my lifespan.
It was from my sister's pile of books that I stole poetry, or say poetry kidnapped me. Being a literature student, she had some copies of West African Verse, The Joys of Motherhood, and many other dramas. This was the beginning of my blood-relationship with my sister. We spoke through books and blood; we flooded the house with bookblood.
Flashback: before the incidence of her mental illness, my sister was the type that could make rocks turn to something orange — her jokes and joviality were her only names.
There was this day she prepared a pot of okra. Okra wasn't a friend of mine, so I quarrelled her for cooking my enemy. Strange