Staying on the green

I am stuck in a colourful village garden trying to find out exactly what it is that I am meant to be doing with my little one-in-humanity life. I have just been born into this new world of reality. The (hyper)real world where dogs eat dogs? Or do they just really bite? This world where virginity holds no value in the face of my peers except an attitude that perhaps virginity and anything that challenges one’s own morality is maintained by those who believe they are “holier than thou”. I have made myself very familiar with this world where “everything that is meant to be bad makes so many people feel so good and all the things they tell us not to do are exactly what we would.” The world where there’s a cry for rebellion! Every rule is meant to be broken. It is so hard to see right from wrong, white from grey and grey from black.
My life used to be about taking care of Dad, cleaning up after my brother and getting my head around school. A world so small and yet so big for my fourteen-year-old self who had no idea what life had coming for me. Now I am studying how far black I am and what makes me a woman in the ethics of identity and reading the letters of Timothy to find that God would have me be silent and humble and promises my salvation in my womb, my faith and my holiness. I seem to be chasing the elusive in an attempt to find the answers. Why must they evade me so? Love? Lust? Identity? Me and what I am against the contrasting context of the world as I know it?
It is easy to drown in the muddy dirt of all the questions and answers that the world will give as a guide. I have come out coughing up filth myself. It is inevitable to struggle in the swamp of it when the innocence and naivety that once held you like a baby to a breast, slips away when you are “not 12 years old anymore”. You just grow up. You live. You are alive.
This real life of mine has taken on another colourful reality and I am contemplating what life will be like after 20. I don’t know if I want to be “17 again”. It is a long and muddy road through being a teenager. It is still quite dusty even now. Looking behind me, I see how my life has been decorated with flowers of accomplishment, around the mud puddles of pain and the pools of tears that still turn the dust to mud and waters my flowers to bud.
There are flowers though and patches of green in this ugly place. I find them and they find me. It is the vicious cycle that is also the village garden.