Yewande

Photo by Audrey M Jackson on Unsplash

Sitting on a wooden chair by a candle light, Yewande looks out of the dormitory window, over the still-burning candle to the courtyard beneath where the other girls are playing. There are no bars but the restraints are there; chains not visible to the eye but one that nonetheless binds her to her faith against her will. She remembers her first night at the convent. It had been a very quiet and lonely night. She had not been able to sleep that night or the many nights that followed. Alone in her room, she would cry for long periods until it became clear that crying was a futile attempt at changing her situation. When she eventually mustered strength to sleep, she had many dreams and nightmares that kept her awake in the austere confines of her room till Time became a thing she used to know; not that it mattered in any serious sense. The work of God was for eternity and the vacillation of everyday life, measured in time, was only a distraction from the work that needed to be done — or so Mother Superior admonished at mass. As such, her life had slid easily past the walls since that first night.

She closes her eyes to force memories awake but only random thoughts in scattered fray fills her head in the voices of people in her now distant past — voices that follow her in daytime as thoughts, at night as wooly dreams.

“Yewande is very much like Mama. She will be a nun just as Mama wished in her life time”.