Their words, carelessly spoken, spent the last 40 days in my
home — getting creased and folded, worked over, brushed aside to make room for dinner, stepped on by a toddler,
read by my
sister, stained with coffee, shoved into a closet when guests arrive, blacked out, thrown away, turned into poems, and folded into sailboats and cranes and pigeons that now sit smiling
at me from my office window.
I found myself feeling very much
at home as I
read Sefi Atta's descriptions of adult sibling dynamics — the familiar ways that
sisters and brothers, no matter how old they are and how far away they live from one another, fall back into their childhood taunts and jokes and tensions when they go back
home.