Eaves And A Butterfly Of Rainbows—Okolo Chinua

Okolo Chinua is a writer who writes for many reasons, the beauty of tomorrow being the foremost. Currently, he lives and writes from the suburbs of Onitsha, Anambra state, Nigeria. 

EAVES AND A BUTTERFLY OF RAINBOWS 

"The wonderful thing about the eye is that it reflects... The eyes are the window to the soul"

For this to begin you need a little bit of silence... And breeze, and trees and trees... Something has to come out of you so yes, to see this clearly you need to look with closed eyes...

'The universe is a memoranda of many things incomplete', I begin, with a haphazard mind as I scratch off the line. The air is thin and I'm running out of silence. It all starts with you and me and them. We wake up in world where bigger pencils enveloped in face masks and blues stand before us, each with open arms offering a huge welcome...those in hell smile the brightest and offer the best of hugs. It's devoid of meaning but we squint, kick our legs and scream. If we don't do that the finger close to us will prick again to remind us that hell is a place of hot things so we open our mouths and shout and shout and shout and watch the pencils become umbrellas in various shades of smiles. There's an envelope above scenting of warmth and difference and red. It's shaped different, different from the pencils we've seen so far so we observe, keen as our eyes search deep into its... Its eyes glimmer, and glow and dazzle... It's blinding...

You see for each step you make there's a million words as to how better you should have done it. It's always easy to ask for the Lion's tale to counter the story of the hunt but no one wants to do the scribbling. We pause. This world is a glass cup and like ice cubes we dangle with every shake. The wonderful thing about cubes is that it's always better when it's double so we search for the glimmer, for that glow. The first time we see a ray we buckle it in a folded paper and slip into the source's bag. Perphaps like the sun they'll be willing to be generous... But some rays are flickers of dead torches... This we find out before another pencil mouthing different ways to climb the sky and how we've chosen the earth scourges us. But the earth is cool and soft and moist... We thin out...

The second time we found a pillar of roaring flames, strong enough to scorch our being and burn from inside out... This time we walked towards the flame and with our footwears off became secondary Moseses. And flames always respond so we burn, and burn and burn until our flickers become embers and smoke and dust... But then, doesn't one have to burn to come out brand new? We persevere...

It's decades now and the attics of our minds have become libraries of many things. For instance, flames and glows and dazzles are just colours, just like plant and growth and the sky, each for a different day, for a different feeling, like an outfit to be worn to show what your heart has become. And the second... The door of our mind opens slowly... I see it, the glow, the glimmer, the dazzle, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen... My mother reappears...