Laetitia Mugerwa: Dear Life, Give Us a New Day

Dear life,

It’s hard to exchange pleasantries with you right now so I will head straight into why I am writing this letter to you. You have been unfair and unkind to me and, for the most part, brutal to many across the globe. I hope that through this letter, I can find the courage and boldness to be your truth-teller. Perhaps my boldness will draw you and me closer to truth and reconciliation.

Life, you were pleasant to me at the beginning of this year. You brought so much light to my aspirations as though they were your own. Yet, beneath your light lay the shadows upon which the epitaph of despair would lay. If at that moment, I had seen what you intentionally concealed, maybe I would have hidden far from you. More than many are drained in the memory of those passed into the alibis where your life won’t shine.

Oh, life do you care to tell why you came into my wearing flesh. Did you ever ask for permission? What was my response because I can’t remember? As far as I can remember, every man has a right to choose. Of course, I neither know nor expect your response. That’s how every attempted conversation with you always turns out. I often wonder if it wasn’t my choice but yours to make for you and me to be together. If so then, you better own up to all this mess now!

2020 has been so unfamiliar to many people; relatives are forced to bury their loved ones virtually. It is hard for everyone everywhere and your silence is so loud in our despair. What do you think about us? Do you care? Do you care for a daughter who can’t hold her dying mother’s hand? Does it matter enough to you that a son can only watch his dear father glopping for breath through a glassed room? If you care, then do something about it. Give us a new day. Lead us not into the shadows of despair but deliver every man from the memory of 2020. What’s the price of your care so every man will cast his lot and pay the cost? Oh life, you never stop working in complicated ways. You make me so vulnerable and weak. Yet, in my weakness, I know that you and I aren’t equals. So I lay this year’s frustration with the almost humility at your feet with the hope that a new day will surely come.

Now that the truth I know is the truth of all men, I propose a noble conversation about reconciliation, and perhaps a toast to a new year and new day. Having fallen in love once, I know how the idea or the thought of reconciliation can be hard. After a year like 2020, so many find a reason for reconciliation. There are so many broken souls and spirits, and we don’t know how to fix what we can’t see!

Dear life, do one selfless act before I get entangled in the philosophy of self and less. If there exist any differences among us, let’s talk about them. Tell me who wronged you so I can find a way to correct their wrong. Is there a cause for all the deaths and rampage of despair? If there is, help me fathom what I can do about it so we are even. For every debt I owe you, I am willing to pay four times. Oh life, teach me now how to number my days for I know that every heartbreak is never devoid of that purpose. Let me be the one that got away. Let my voice be your guide in travel through infinity.

Prepare me a way in all this desert, make straight every crooked path, and fill every valley of loneliness inside my heart. Make me a new day that my soul will cease to memorialize that trauma of 2020. Lay the table for all the seed of men and confine every heartbreak in the selves of history. Oh life, give us a new day, and our daily bread.

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