It was a hot Wednesday when máami died. I did not feel any sense of foreboding, to warn me that the life I knew would change forever, neither did my skin rise up in tiny bubbles of fear, a prelude to the inevitable. She left the world exactly how she lived in it, easily and without a fuss.

She left the world with a chunk of my heart.

I, who was her granddaughter, her ìdí ilẹkẹ. I had never imagined a world where my grandmother was not present. You see, she has always been a permanent fixture in my life - a constant, always sure and ever reliable - just like your favorite blanket. When I got my first period, máami was there to buy me sanitary products and teach me how to use them. The smell of cocoa butter and orí were not foreign concepts in my house and because of that, I had never imagined that her scent would fade into the air, departing with its owner.

You know what they don't tell you about grief? It never ends. There is no livable stage where things get easier and time is merely a consolation you spend your days yearning for. Like a parasite, it eats you up and travels through your veins, resting in a spot before continuing the vicious cycle over again, ever reminding you of its intrusion.

I was in ruins, unable to adjust to a life without the only love I knew. So I chose not to live at all, spending each day in hope of silence. A fatality that would usurp me in a way that I could not be faulted for. After all, they happened everyday. I prayed for an exit but it never came. And that made me bitter. So much so that I chased death religiously, flirting and teasing in hopes of one day provoking it enough to reply.

I only felt alive when I fed my demons.

They wanted blood and so I gave them blood, slashing my wrists furiously to get the silence I desperately needed.

Maybe it was too much. But how would you know when you do not understand? And how can you understand when you are not wandering around Earth untethered from your home? When you can call out to your kin and it is not met with echoes?

I had nobody to cry with. No one to reminisce about that one time máami wrestled with me over the last piece of àkàrà, no one else to dance recklessly to Sunny Adé with. My names have died with you because no one else knows them.

The thing they don't tell you about grief is that it arrives with resentment following closely behind its tails. I resent the people who have reasons to smile, who can go about their chores without collapsing in the weight of their agony. Who can laugh and not immediately feel guilty after. I resent my friends because they think condolences and hushed whispers were enough, as if treating me like a delicate thing that needed space for recovery was the best way to move forward. Why didn't they see that I was instead a ticking bomb? With one leg in life and the other in death, skittering but never settling? I still wonder about these things and maybe my sadness was just too heavy for their light- a foreign thing that could not be understood unless experienced.

It was a regular foggy day when I exhaled.

I did not feel any special tingling prior to that, indicating the opening of a new chapter; neither was I uncharacteristically optimistic. But I was going through máami's pictures when I saw her, laughing, in all her dark-skinned gold-toothed glory. Máami shone through the silvery film of the photograph and smiled right at me, her ìdí ilẹkẹ, with eyes filled with peace and contentment. I could hear her say it, almost as if she were here.

Ọmọ mí

She called and then I exhaled, letting out the breath I did not know I held in. I exhaled, feeling light. Knowing things were never going to be the same but also relaxing in the delusion that it would be okay. Because sometimes, it is good to be delusional when all you have left is hurt.

I am not completely certain of when the grief in me will end but I am grateful for now and how it is a dull aching that I can live with.

Today, I applied cocoa butter and orí on my skin, danced to some Sunny Adé and let the sun into my bedroom. I went to máami's grave, sitting next to her and listening, waiting. It was all silence, the one my heart had longed for- the good type.

Maybe the pain I feel is not so bad, because with it I can never forget that I was máami's ìdí ilẹkẹ. I can never forget the names she saved just for me and the hugs that wrapped me up in security. Because with the pain, I remember that love was once here and still thrives.

From the land of the living and to the land of the dead.