OUT OF PROPORTION

“Hey Dad, look at me… I’m scared.”

“Of course, you can do it. ‘You can do aaall things,’ remember?” I reassured. “Go Darling,” I cheered, giving her a harder push, as her swing slices the air in a wider arc.

While I called her “Darling,” I told myself that apart from ‘L’ (which, incidentally is initial alphabet of her first name, Linda), the rest of the word is aptly what she is: DARING – plain, unabashedly, daring – which, though not always a safe thing, isn’t a bad feature. Not that it ever was, at least not until…

“Make sense of this for me, Honey,” my wife sobs, tears from her swollen red eyes already tributaries to watery discharge from her nostrils, no thanks to hours of ceaseless crying. But I’m mute.

“… ‘You can do aaall things,’ remember?”

Could I have imbued my pretty princess’ psyche with something less, other than what Scriptures say? With an extreme case of inferiority complex, she was dangerously withdrawn as early as three. Should I have relented in ingraining the truth of truths in her subconscious – especially where meds and psychoanalysts cum -therapists botched?

“…aaall things…”

Perhaps, I’d have said “many” or “ ‘safe’ things.” I could have added that in the syllabus of faith, wisdom is not an elective; neither should caution be omitted even in the reckoning of skilled capabilities. I should have told her that truth, when overstretched, is decoy into borderline recklessness – which kills swifter than lie. That way, at least, I wouldn’t have had to fly over now to retrieve the corpse of my only child from the morgue.

But I resized the truth. I exaggerated it. I blew it. Out of proportion.

Or what else, in a bid to disprove her friends who said she can’t, could have driven my skilled swimmer of a daughter to dive from a 32ft-high springboard into water only two inches deep? Shards of skull, meaty brain fragments and her body floating in a college gymnasium swimming pool was the image we had received. I gently seize the phone from her Mom for the umpteenth time, wishing I could really make sense of it all for her.

With the back of my hand, I wipe mist off the airplane window. It only sharpens the image of my Linda on the swing at age 4, her shrill voice louder in my flustered head:

“Hey Dad, look at me…”

Written By: ~Bunmi Oke~

Image Source:Google Images

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