Sing Of A Tree In The Wild

Pre-Collision

One Month Ago

Elfrida's Perspective

Today's breakfast isn't any different from how it has always been.

A daily struggle.

The recurrent torture.

A few minutes prior, I was sitting in silence, on my bed.

"Elfrida!" my mother rang out.

My mother.

A few minutes earlier, I had, like all other mornings, woken up to a life I didn't want to live, to an existence I had since lost touch of. For many years, I have lived out the blank notebook of my life, flipping through the page of each day, ripping each page to shreds, tearing out every page- and everyone- from my life, including my mother.

My so-called mother.

"Elfrida!!" She called out again, that time louder. It was inevitable. The same scenario would still play out. Hasn't she learned already?

"Elfrida!!!"

I could hear her footsteps. She was my jailer, approaching my cell room to hand out my morning punishment. Not that I had done any wrong, though.

I was on the receiving end of both injustice and punishment.

I receive punishment for being wronged.

"Elfrida! Can't you hear me? It's time for breakfast. Your food is getting cold, for goodness sake!"

It's not as if the food she gave me was given out of love. She was just prolonging my sentence in this maximum security prison called life. My soul had long left my body. It departed, piece after piece.Her demise ripped a part out. And so did he, the red-eyed monster. So did my father. So did my mother.

"Does this always have to happen every morning?" She said. She took the sentence word by word. Each word was accompanied by her evergreen belt landing painfully on various parts of my body.

The lashes that designed my body in numerous areas.

The lashes.that shaped me into the lifeless wax sculpture that I am today.

"Whenever you're ready to eat, your food is waiting for you on the table. Useless girl. Ejo." After those words, she departed. Another daily routine was over. Even as I lay on the floor of my room, crying out an ocean, I pondered on who was more of a snake: me or my so-called mother.

That was thirty minutes ago.

Now I am sitting on my table, staring at the food laid out before me. The plates seemed empty to me, just as empty as my life has always been.

What's there in this world to give me hope, anyway?

For many years, I've rummaged through countless romance paperbacks, Harlequin and the rest of them. Love is an inevitable, recurring theme in all these novels; a romantic, beautiful and pristine feeling. The feeling I have never experienced, the feeling I will probably never experience. Even if I experienced such love, would it be enough to liberate me from the shackles of my existence? Would it be powerful enough to give me a new hope? Would it restore the fallen branches to my solitary edifice? Would it bring daylight to my pitch-blackness, the way God did when he said, 'Let there be light'? Will these questions ever be answered?