DEAR ALEXA

Year Six, Age Fifteen.

Dear Alexa,

Happy new year is what I would have wished people and people would have wished my family and I if the calamity that befell us hadn't happened. My world finally crumbled that day as I watched our house burn to the ground. A part of me died as fire consumed the place that held so many memories. Good ones and bad ones, it's all gone.

Alexa, I'm sorry but the darkness has consumed and trapped me. Alexa, I'm sorry but I've lost all the hope and faith I ever had in life. Alexa, I'm sorry but I let my demons win as I battled them so much till I got drained of strength and accepted defeat. Alexa, I'm sorry but I can't find it in me to continue to love my life. Alexa, I'm sorry but I blame the world and I hate the world for my misery. Alexa, I'm sorry but I died and I've become a shadow of myself.

While everyone else wished their friends and family happy new year on the crossover night, Mummy, Irene, Marcel and I spent it watching our house turn to ashes. Everything we've ever owned gone with the wind like the ashes that remained after the fire. It was a nightmare, one that's been haunting me every night.

Every night, Alexa, I see fire roaring, rising as it climbs higher and higher into the sky. I feel the blazing hotness against my skin, it feels like I walked into hell as sweat pours down my face and my body heats up and burns. I smell the staleness of smoke as it wafts into my nose and it reminds me of the smoke that pours out of my mother's customers as they puff cigarettes, the smoke from this fire is not pleasant at all, it's worse but it also smells earthy and spicy. I hear the crackling of wood as the fire eats away at the house and as the flames licks up the structure of what I used to call home.

It's been six months now since we became homeless and my family scattered like soldier ants that fire was lit on their trail. It's hard to remember everything that has happened since then, I just know my legs got diverted unto another path and I was forced to adapt to a new way of life. As much as I had disliked mummy and Irene, I miss them so much, I miss Marcel a lot, he is like the only thing that makes sense in my life. How ironical is it that I hadn't wanted to parted from my beloved school not long ago and I got my wish, I returned to school for barely more than a year and some months then I had it snatched away from me.

I got dealt a glaring reality, one I was not familiar with, one I had no choice but to accept and adapt to. I didn't get a warning of how life would become for me and it's safe to say I've still not gotten used to it. I went from living in a comfortable house in the city to living in a shabby looking hut in a village. I tell you, it's absolutely terrible and horrific, I always fall sick at least twice every month. I thought I had gotten thin before when we had started having difficulties finding something to eat back at home but it's nothing compared to this. This is me looking like a twig, like the tiny sticks my cousins rejects whenever we go to fetch firewood in the forest, I'm even thinner than mummy when she had given birth to Marcel.

All that is nothing, it's nothing compared to the torture of having to farm every weekend. Yes, farm, Alexa. It's so funny, I now know how to remove cocoa from it's pod, I now know the one trillion processes that comes with making palm oil. I always feel miserable whenever I have to walk the one thousand miles from the house to school in the morning and from school back to the house in the blazing hot sun of the two o'clock afternoon general closing time for all students, the sun is always extra hot at that time. I know you think I'm exaggerating but I swear it's a great distance from the house to that hellish school.

Do I even start describing the school? It's absolutely horrible, it's like a bad dream come true. Is it the classrooms that are not conducive at all with the larger than life windows that the students use in escaping to the bushes when they don't like the subject being taught or the creaky wooden chairs that pokes my behind. Is it the small insects that bites my legs everday like mosquitoes yet they are called 'fin-fin' by everyone else. Is it the lousy and annoying classmates that have no sense of personal space and like asking irritating questions and staring at me like I'm a specimen they couldn't understand. Is it the obnoxiously loud and dumb teachers that love speaking Yoruba to students. I'm sorry to say but I haven't been learning anything ever since I joined this stupid school.