Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
A Heart That Multiplies
No one notices
when the day begins inside her.
Before the kettle remembers its song,
before the window quite let in morning,
she is already gathering scattered hours
into something the family can live inside.
She carries invisible things –
an appointment no one else will
remember,
a sweater already folded once into a
schoolbag,
rain waiting somewhere without warning.
She makes an apology
for arguments she did not begin,
simply because peace
has learned her name too well.
There are afternoons
when silence follows her
from room to room,
not like loneliness exactly,
but like another task
she has not finished.
She wonders, briefly,
who she was
before every thought
began with someone else tomorrow.
Then a laugh cuts through the house –
too loud, to alive to ignore.
A voice calls, Mum.
Just that.
And something in her shifts –
not fixed, but pulled back together
in a way she cannot explain.
She does not mistake love for ease.
She knows it is built
the way rivers worry stone:
slowly, without witness,
until every hardness begins to change shape.
The First Shelter
Long before the first lullaby,
before blankets, before names
stitched into fabric
that will never stay clean,
she was learning
what it means to hold something
that does not yet have language.
Time came in small, private signals –
a turn, a kick, a sudden stillness
that no one else could hear.
The world kept asking
whether she was ready,
as though readiness
ever arrives before love does.
Then one ordinary morning,
everything narrowed
to the size of breath in a room.
It fits inside her arms –
this miracle that once lived only as waiting.
After that, days began changing shape.
Shoes left by doorways that never stay
empty.
Rooms rearranged by growth she did not
vote for.
Hands that once held her finger
now testing the distance of departure.
Still, something returns –
not always in bodies,
sometimes only in echoes:
a word spoken the same way she once
spoke it,
a laugh that forgets to be careful.
Perhaps that is motherhood –
not holding everything,
but becoming the place
where things first learn they are safe
and the place they return to
without always knowing why.
Chidimma Ewelukwa is a Nigerian writer whose work explores memory, belonging, identity, and the quiet tensions of everyday life. She has been published in Writer Monk Literary Magazine.
