Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

This is what Gloria does. She protects. She makes the choice to be the bad guy so the rest of us don’t have to. It is a role she stepped into readily and which, somewhere along the way, I started to take for granted. It is the role she is playing even now.

Remembering can be tiresome work. Not all memories weigh the same.

Despair had never welcomed an inhabitant so dedicated to its cause as me.

She has always been fiercely protective of us, has always taken on the role of fixer without being asked. She has fallen on her sword for all her loved ones, and she wears that badge and wields that fact like heavy artillery. Any resentment she has is because she has chosen her role, and it is also because we have allowed her to choose it. Repeatedly.