love Archives | midnight & indigo

We Are Only a Moment: An Ode to My Mother

Kiah Wallace — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:37:37 +0000

It’s April, and around this time I usually get a visit from an old friend–grief. A visit that I never looked forward to until now, I understand it now. I leave the door open, but it slips through a window. The element of surprise seems to be necessary. I’m greeted with a tight hug, my eyes well up, and we take a ride down memory lane. I never understood the phrase ‘grief comes in waves’ until I was seated in the ocean. Melandy: a nurturer who exuded bravery and courage. My mother knew the power of her imagination and she

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But I don’t want her to be sad

Cy White — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:10:23 +0000

Hey, hey, hey! You’ve reached the phenomenally favored and fantastic ______! It is her mantra every month. A cadence like daytime television, like weather that’s going to be sunny on the West Coast, with perfect skies and the perfect amount of wind to keep things pleasant. She steps into this role because she must. Because as mother, she believes that doing so will make her… My mother and I are headed to the magical pink Candyland of Dallas, Texas, where Mary Kay consultants, directors and internationally renowned bedazzled, Pepto-pink juggernauts known as Nationals converge

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Time is Different in Toronto

Udochukwu Chidera — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 04:00:35 +0000

Japa – Migration (Noun) Origin: Yoruba, meaning ‘to run swiftly’ ‘to escape’ Translated from the Nigerian Urban Dictionary The year after the shoot-out cut short the lives of innocent protesters at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos marked the period of mass exodus of many Nigerian citizens. That same year, my cousin was kidnapped. I didn’t wait to be the next victim stuffed in the back of a car like a sack of potatoes; I left. I packed my two suitcases with my dreams, jackets and thermal wears, and was embraced by the cold Canadian wind that rushed into my nostrils

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Untethered, Unclaimed, Unbroken

Fatima Abdullahi — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 05:00:22 +0000

It is a Saturday, and the sweltering Nigerian sun seems to have a point to prove, or a vendetta. I walk toward the cavernous hall, following my mother’s uneven steps. She has had arthritis for several years now, and a host of other problems that have permanently altered the way she walks. Like Chinonso Nzeh lamented so heart wrenchingly in his award winning essay, my mother is “slipping away.” I pause behind her while she climbs the steps, tracking her feet with my eyes and wondering at what age I will start experiencing the same afflictions. Hers had started in

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Strange Water

Nwenna Kai — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 05:00:53 +0000

The VCR The day has come. Mama and Papa brung the box in the house. Me and Yannie are upstairs listening to Thriller for like the 10th time and we splitting our bodies in half dancing and foot locking and bopping. Our room becomes this dance studio. Our walls plastered with life sized posters of our favorite dance movies: Fame, Footloose, and Flashdance. We also got our beatbox radio like the one from the Beat Street movie. Yannie gets fancy with the fake glitzy glove we bought last year when she wanted to be Michael Jackson for Halloween, but Papa

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Of Ashes and Peppermint

Kyra Ann Dawkins — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:44:14 +0000

“You were ashes.” As I stood in the doorway of my sister Everette’s bedroom just past midnight, tears were warm and sticky on my face like honey on toast. I’d said what I needed to say. I knew those three words were the truest I’d ever said in my six-year life. I knew more truth then. It was one of those moments I wished someone would have painted and put in a picture book so I could’ve seen the story of it from outside my small body. The silky fabric of my rose pink nightgown pooling around my feet. The

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Seen and Not Heard

Lindale Banks — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 08:13:37 +0000

I grew up in the heart of the Midwest during the 1970s, the era of peace, love, Vietnam War protests and what others claimed to be the end of the Civil Rights Era. My mama and I stayed with my great-grandmother, her paternal grandmother, who was an associate pastor of a church during a time when women were forbidden to be behind a pulpit, and she was also head of the mother board. Everyone simply referred to her as, Reverend-Mother. Our two-bedroom house was the color of pine trees and sat on a grassy hill, with steep concrete steps leading

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Gloves

Nikki R. Byrom — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 05:00:54 +0000

I don’t like the gloves the nurses leave here. They’re rubber and have powder on the inside. The powder cakes up when mixed with the sweat and sometimes piss that finds its way past my wrist and into the fingers. They make my hands pasty white and wrinkly. In my mind, no amount of scrubbing rids my hands of their smell, and no amount of lotion or oil or cream makes my hands brown again. The gloves are much too large for my hands. I ask for smaller ones, but because this isn’t really about me, I’m told to put

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Echoes Of Green Beans and Grief

Ebony Moody — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 04:00:58 +0000

For seven days straight, I’d dreamed of snapping green beans at my Nana’s feet, on the floor in the dining room, up against the wall with a metal strainer cupped in my lap. This crystalized moment, while laborious to some, I dutifully cherished. In this safe space I’d shared the unmentionable thoughts of my childhood. The things I dare not say aloud, already too shameful to think about. Yet, somehow through the wisdom of her years, she saw the tenderness behind my piercing confessions. While my words presented as sharp weapons, I, in fact, was the one who was bleeding

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Fifteen Steps

Ada Chinara — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 04:19:03 +0000

My favorite book as a child was The People Could Fly. I stared with fascination at the illustrations of people with backs as straight as ironing boards, feet lifted magically off the ground, breath carrying bodies to a place only their eyes could see. At night, I dreamed about flying— always out my bedroom window, always on an ironing board, as straight as the backs of the people who could fly. I whisked through the night sky, light as air. At some point the board vanished, and it was just me, flying, floating, never falling. I had this dream so

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