Eternal Unrest

Millan Tarus, Kenya, FIRST PLACE WINNER

I met him during winter. I was walking home, toes frozen, missing everything about home. There he was, a tall figure of light piercing through the roof of the bus stop. He smelled like an old man trapped in a young man’s body. I knew his kind from one of my mother’s spectral encounters. We sat in silence, sulking at the cold. When the bus came, he entered my heart and followed me.

At the house, he told me to boil some tea, then placed my hand over the pot, curious to know the texture of the steam on my skin. I became a bird, breaking down each meal into words and descriptions for him to feed.

The kitchen stool was his favorite spot. It reminded him of kipsiryot — the ladder into the farm. To him, it was a possibility to connect with home even if just for a brief moment. We sat there for days, gossiping about the trees, whose land the river ate and who thunder struck. He told me he came to chase a dream but his blood never returned home. He has been marooned for decades, roaming the streets with nothing but a song. I was too scared to ask him how he died.

He was excited to show me his best friend. When we got there, we found a lone oak tree cut in half — roots and trunk intact but all the branches sawed off clean. This was the only time he ever cried. A most violent soul lives in this land, he said. You should return home before it swallows you.

He loved to say life is not beautiful and my heart would shatter every time. I wanted to disagree, but all that came out was a hopeless inshallah, you will return.

One day, the wind took us to an illegal protest against all the bloodshed. I taught him how to chant while he held me down on the cold concrete floor, dissolving each wave of fear as more cops circled us. Afterward, we went to a party. He lost himself in the riddimz and the eeeeyyys — whining with strangers in a circle, to songs that came way after him. It was the happiest I ever saw him.

On the last day, he escorted me to the airport and gifted me his song. I let go of all those tears I held from him. Tears formed by the wind, mixed with salt and rain, waiting for darkness to fall.

His song lingered during the entire flight:

I miss the rain
I miss the cows
I miss your tears
Tears to wash me from this world to the next

He was the sweetest. He opened my eyes to eternal unrest, showing me a violence that never stops. I wish I could return him to that pocket of light between day and night where he was born. Return him home. To life. To freedom. To rest.

Editorial note:

According to Millan this text is part of a video installation/performance titled 1000 Ways to Miss Home:

An unconscious record and translation of an encounter with OSSEN, a living dead person on eternal unrest and displacement. Ossen is trapped between fiction & life, between home and away. He lives in half-moments, following the wind, waiting for a joy that never comes.

Together we ritualized home, followed the wind, walking, and did all things that connected us to home. We created a human pendulum to meditate on this eternal unrest. This suspension unearthed a violence that never stops. We resonate with the permanence of such pain. I have wrestled/I am wrestling with the presentation of such violence. There’s a desire to sanitize this image, a desire to transcend this violence but Ossen insists it is a violence we must navigate.

This work is an invitation to grieve eternal unrest and disconnection from life. It is a longing to return home, to return to life, to return to rest.