The Night Before I Was Born
My sister told me the story one night, years later, the kind of night that has a particular quality of darkness — the kind where the truth slips through because everyone is tired of carrying it.

She told me that the month before I was born, my father — drunk, as he sometimes was in those years — beat my mother. He kicked her in the abdomen. She was eight months pregnant with me. And as he kicked her, he screamed words that I will not let myself write in full here, except to say that he told her he would beat the baby out of her.

My mother fell to her knees.
Not in surrender. In prayer.

She prayed that whatever was inside her would remain. And I did. I stayed. I came into the world two months later, beneath a banana tree, in the quiet of a morning that had no idea what it was beginning.

When I was a few months old, malaria swept through the village, as it did most years. Thousands of babies died. I was one of the ones who nearly did. I went into a coma — not in a hospital, not hooked to machines, but on a mat on the floor of that mud house, while my mother tried everything she knew to try. She prayed again. She used the traditional herbal medicines that were all she had. My sisters stood around her, watching, and they told me later that they had never seen such strength in a person — the kind of strength that has no good explanation.

After hours, I came back.
Everyone called it a miracle. My mother called it answered prayer. I grew up calling her my number-one hero, and that has not changed.

What the Walls Knew
Here is the thing about a childhood like mine: it does not leave you the way you might expect.

You might think that a person who grew up in that house, in that village, with those early brushes with violence and death, would spend their adult life running. And perhaps I did, for a while. But what I found, in the running, was that Kisaka ran with me. The hills ran with me. The river ran with me. My mother's voice, low and steady in the smoke of the kitchen, ran with me.

I would go back sometimes — in memory, in dreams, in the actual act of returning — and I would stand in front of that old mud house and trace the marks we had made on the walls. Drawings. Scribbles. The evidence of small lives being lived. Worthless in anyone else's eyes, my sister once said. But not in mine.

The wall was old and crusty, yes. But it had stood through every season. It had felt the rain and the sunshine the same way. It had heard everything I could not say out loud.
I used to think that growing up the way I did was something to overcome. I understand now that it was something to carry — differently, more carefully, but carry nonetheless. Because the weight of it is also the reason I know what I know. It is the reason I understand what it means to be cold at night and still find a way to sleep. It is the reason I know the sound a mother makes when she is praying for you and does not know you can hear her.

It is the reason, when I sit down to write this story, I feel that particular fear — and write it anyway.