A C H A P E L TA L K
by Langelihle Chinyoka ’17 Sepetember 16, 2016 voces
Forgetting the
Flowers that Didn’t Grow Ellen Harasimowicz
“all my layers have become trees . . .” 1
I
Langa in The Wiz
n one of my earliest memories, I am sitting in the shade, hiding from the sun. My sister is beside me, under a tree, and we are eating the fruit as it falls. The ground beneath us is a burning color, our feet have turned the same, and we are catching our breath, having run across the hot floor to get there. This is one of the memories I know is mine. There are others, of course—being carried on my mother’s back and rocked to sleep; going to school and being mistaken for a boy; the first sunset I remember, burning orange against the sky—but mostly my memories of home come from stories, from pictures. Some of these stories are cute, are funny—for example, how I got the scar in the middle of my forehead when my cousin pushed me off, rather than down, a slide because I annoyed her, or how I learned to talk by watching Shrek on repeat—but some are less so: how I woke up one morning and saw my dog bleeding on the patio, how the police came to our house, knocked on our door, and told my parents to leave the country. I don’t remember anything about this day, or the subsequent panic, or fear, and I haven’t ever really wanted to fill in the gaps with stories so I prefer to remember the tree, how my sister and I raced to get there, how we sat on the red, red hot dirt, how it caught beneath our fingernails, and how we stayed outside until it was dark and the ground was cool enough to walk on.
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