DAY ONE. SAUDADE.

Saudade; word of Portuguese origin. The feeling of intense longing for a person or a place you love but is now lost. A haunting desire for what is gone.

Photographs are messed up. Over the years they have evolved, from being the reason my mother bathed and dressed me up for to something I make duck face for when I wake up and then quickly delete. My father loved pictures, I have numerous baby pictures documenting everything that happened in my life. My mother hates them, I don’t know why. A man from church was robbed and the thieves took his laptop. “I almost went to witchdoctor, luckily I forgot my wallet!” He said. His laptop had photographs of his baby girls from the day they were born. They are now 5 and 7 respectively and now he has no evidence of his memories. I too have lost a photo album with the only existing picture of a fully grown me with my late father. The witchdoctor is a sensible option when you lose something special. Recently I went to a wedding looking so fly, those ‘snap and give’ camera men can make a girl feel like a celebrity. I indulged them, struck a pose. I hated the pictures, I looked bloated, old and as if my powder was a shade to light. Terrible. I started working out the day after and threw out my foundation. I was sorting out my stuff on Alexander (my laptop who I named that for no reason) and I came across pictures of a different time and I clicked right and right and I kept going on, reliving the moments. In the pictures I was with who felt closest, I felt pretty, I was happy, carefree and I was in the moment. In photographs were I was insecure I felt it again.

So strange, the girl I was in the pictures does not exist and today I am ready to admit that sometimes I miss her. She had hair, long hair that framed her face like a crown, she didn’t know what she looked like but she took pictures, she smiled and she fell in love. Sometimes she drank too much and her eyes were red in all the pictures. Some selfies are those she took right before she got laid, and some pictures were taken after she got laid with a stolen boyfriend. She wasn’t fearless, she was foolish. Like a child who has never been burned she admired flames because they were orange, red and pretty. I miss that girl but I don’t want to be her again. I wish I could have been her friend to tell her to be wiser with her friends, to get better grades and think about what she wants. I wish I could have been there to tell her not to suck her best friend’s dick or to try Jamaican rum. I wish I could have reminded her to remember God, I wish I could have stopped her from going everywhere because not everybody could understand that she was just an innocent fool. I wish I could have told her that she was smart, beautiful, brilliant, strong and loyal. She had to meet a boy who broke her heart, her daddy had to die and she had to really actually look into the mirror. I wish it didn’t take bad things for her to learn.

You know what I miss the most about her? Her ability to feel. She felt remorse, she trusted, she fell in love, when she ate she really tasted, she empathised and she wasn’t proud. Her heart was big and beating on her sleeve and she wasn’t ashamed of being so human. She was real. Today I miss her. I miss her because I get cold, I miss her because I rarely trust for no reason. I miss her because now I calculate my gains and the moments are rare when I just live. I miss her because she was unaware of her goodness and yet still so good. It is sad that some people will never get to meet her, she is hidden inside the woman I have become. The woman I have become is aware of the games of the world and has to make a conscious decision not to be a part of it. The girl I used to be taught me that worldly games lead to worldly wins and nothing worldly ever lasts. She isn’t dead. She resides in my passions and she is the part of me that laughs, she is the part of me that loves, she is the part of me that is the friend. Today we just miss her because there was a time when she was all of me.