Good Riddance Poem by Mulunda Silingi Phelix Nasiombe

Bye beb, bye!

My wife, today I may not return.

I am setting out
on a journey without a road back,
A journey whose destination
Even the ancestors may not disclose.

I can already hear you laughing.
Yes, laughing!
You will say
I speak with the authority of alcohol,
That chang'aa has poisoned my mind,
Busaa has blurred my vision,
Bottled liquor has seized my tongue,
And mkojo wa ndovu has taken the steering wheel of my life.

But before you dismiss my words,
Before you bury my truth
beneath the laughter of a drunken man,
Let me ask you something:

Before marriage, was I a drunkard?
Look back, my wife.
Search the pages of our beginning.
What do you see?

Was I not a man
who walked beneath the sun
with a clear head and an open heart?
What of the friends I kept then?
Were they not faithful men,
men who bowed their heads to Jesus
and raised their voices in prayer?

Tell me, my wife,
what happened to that man?
At what point did love become a battlefield,
Our home a courtroom,
And alcohol the only witness
willing to listen to my side?

That is why I am leaving.
But before I go,
Let me speak of the children.
I shall miss their laughter,
Their little feet racing across the floor,
Their innocent questions
That no father ever tires of answering.

Tell my mother
that her son was hurting.

I know she will weep,
perhaps until her voice gives way.
She will fall on the the chairs and hurt herself
She may point a trembling finger at you,
accusing you of driving me to my grave.

Tell her the truth, if you can.
Do not dress my suffering in convenient lies.
Do not blame chang'aa for everything
Or call my despair a simple drunken mistake.

A man can drown in a bottle,
but sometimes the bottle
is only the river
into which his sorrows have pushed him.

And what of my sisters?
They will come with anger in their eyes.
They will call you names,
Prostitute! A whore!
perhaps even call you a murderer.
There will be shouting,
There will be threats,
There may be blows.
Sarah will bite your ear off.

Then your mother and brothers
will rise to defend you.
The lawyers will arrive,
The accusations will multiply,
And money will begin to speak
in the language of the powerful.

But tell me, my wife,
who will speak for the truth?
Do you remember that evening
when I returned home
and found a forty-three-inch television
standing proudly in our sitting room?
I asked you where it came from.
You brushed aside my questions:
"My mother bought it for the children."

I believed you,
or perhaps I wanted to believe you.
A husband should not have to interrogate
every new thing that enters his house.
But later,
the truth came limping through the door.
Brian had bought it for you.

My complaint summoned your mother's fury.
Her words came like stones
hurled through the windows of my dignity.
"You should have allowed Brian to marry you! "
And then those words
those cruel, unforgettable words
about how well Brian pleased you in bed.

My wife,
do you know what such words do to a man
who has placed his whole world
in the hands of one woman?
That evening,
I tasted Tusker for the first time.
You saw the bottle
but not the wound.
You heard the opening of a drink
but not the breaking of a heart.

Your verdict came swiftly:
"So, now you are a drinker! "
You pushed me from our bed.
I spent the night on the couch,
a husband outside his own marriage,
a stranger beneath his own roof.

And the bottle remained beside me,
quiet as a friend
who asks no questions.

Six months later,
another sofa arrived.
Who had bought it?
Kevo.
Again, I asked questions.
Again, my questions became offences.

You poured cold water over me,
as though humiliation
could wash away my right to speak.
Your mother arrived
and ordered me to carry my belongings away.
Then you pointed at my old sofa,
abandoned outside,
exposed to the rain.
"Pick it up and leave! "

Ah, my wife!
Was Kevo's gift worth more than my place
in the home I had helped to build?
Did I do a mistake by buying land in your village?
Was every other man's generosity
a throne upon which he could sit
while I stood outside in the cold?

That night,
Guinness became my companion.
One bottle was not enough.
Two bottles could not silence the questions.
I drank,
hoping the darkness inside me
would finally swallow the darkness around me.

I wanted the bottles
to crush the memory of those words,
to numb the shame,
to make me forget
that my marriage had become
a room full of strangers.

But the bottles betrayed me.
They weakened my knees,
stole the steadiness from my steps,
and left my body trembling.
Yet the memories survived.
They sat beside me,
uninvited,
sober,
and merciless.

My wife,
you did not change.
Or perhaps I was too broken
to recognise the changes.

Then came the day
I found you with another man
in our bed.
Our bed!
The place where we had once whispered promises,
where we had imagined our children,
where two lonely hearts
had sworn to become one home.

And what did you do?
You called upon that man
to beat your own husband.

You watched another man's hands
rise against the man
who had shared your name,
your roof,
your children,
your years.
That moment split my life in two:
The man I had been
and the man I became.

I will not pretend
that what followed was just.
I will not hide behind a bottle
or dress violence in the language of honour.
An innocent life was lost.
And no amount of drinking,
no wound inflicted upon me,
no insult spoken in anger
can make that blood innocent again.

My wife,
the bedroom has never been the same
since that terrible night.
Nor have I.

I carry the weight of what happened
like a stone beneath my ribs.
At the drinking den,
men laugh and pass around their bottles,
but they cannot see
the grave I carry inside me.

They call me their friend.
They know my chair,
my face,
the sound of my footsteps at the door.

They do not know
how close a broken man can stand
to the edge of his own life.
And now, my wife,
you will hear me speak of leaving.

But listen carefully:
I will not call death justice.
I will not call revenge peace.
I will not call a final breath
a solution to the wounds
we refused to heal.

There is a letter,
a letter that must tell the truth
about the night a life was taken,
about the room where it happened,
about the choices we made
and the silence that followed.
Let the truth be heard
without being sharpened into another weapon.

Let the law ask its questions.
Let the living face what they have done.
Let no child inherit our hatred
as though it were family land.

For our children,
my wife,
our children
What shall they remember?
A father who disappeared
behind the fumes of chang'aa?
A mother surrounded by accusations?
A home where love became a contest
and every argument demanded a victim?

They are too young
to understand the language of betrayal.
They should not have to learn it
from the ruins of our marriage.

One day,
they may read these words.
Perhaps at school,
perhaps in a quiet room
where the afternoon light
falls across an empty chair.

Let them know
that their father was more
than his drinking.
Let them know
that their mother was more
than the accusations surrounding her.

Let them know
that adults can wound one another
until the children inherit the scars.
And let them learn
that no home should demand
a life in exchange for silence.

My wife,
I once loved you
with the simplicity of a man
who believed that marriage
was a place to lay down his burdens.

I thought your arms
would be the last shelter
against a cruel world.

I thought our bed
would be a sanctuary,
our children a blessing,
our home a small country
where neither of us would be a stranger.

But somewhere along the way,
we misplaced tenderness.
You loved other men,
or so my wounded heart remembers.
I sought refuge in bottles.
Anger answered anger.
Pain gave birth to pain.
And we watched our love
become a story
neither of us knew how to end.

So, bye, beb.

Not because death is victory.
Not because alcohol tells the truth.
Not because a broken marriage
must end in a broken body.

But because somebody, somewhere,
must finally interrupt this tragedy.
If there is still a voice in me
that can reach you,
let it say this:
I needed a wife, not a battlefield.
I needed a home, not a courtroom.
I needed help, not another bottle.

And if these words reach our children,
let them carry a different inheritance:
May they learn to speak
before silence becomes a weapon.
May they seek help
before sorrow becomes a prison.

May they choose life
when pain insists there is no tomorrow.
For love, my wife,
was never meant to bury us.

And a bottle,
however faithful it may seem at midnight,
cannot hold a man together
when his world is falling apart.

Bye, beb.
I loved you.
But somewhere between
the television,
the sofa,
the bottles,
and the bedroom door,
we lost the home
we once promised each other.

And our children
deserved a better ending.
Bye my wife, note that I copied the letter to the police
Yes, our boda guy will drop it there soon
And as you read this letter, my friends
The men I drink with have discovered my body
It is hot but dead
One may think, I am still alive
I am gone my wife.