The last time I was home, in Nigeria, was for my father’s funeral. I’ve been thinking a lot about that trip lately, because we’re at the one-year mark this week. I remember that as we prepared to make the long journey home, I kept thinking about the light, the sky and the clouds. I remembered how the clouds look after a rainstorm. I remembered how the clouds hang low and glow with the purple-blue of a sunset.

I longed to see the silhouette of the palm trees across the sky. I longed to see the sky.

As we went from one ceremony to another, I would occasionally look up, and marvel at the unbelievable fact that we were burying our father under the same sky which he had walked only a few short months before.

I loved the look of the clouds when they were pregnant with rain. And that smell just before it poured down.

I have tried to describe the light back home and I can’t.

It’s the light in my dreams, when we were all together, way back when.

— Eyes wide open,

Chinwe