tisha's diary - learning to speak

i live underground
no seriously! i live in the basement.
They also offered me the mezzanine.
but that's not a proper floor too, is that?
i still have my own room though, in the basement.
i try to keep everything here.
from embarrassing little necessities to my most expensive clothes.
but i do not have a computer in the basement.
if i did, i would have lived underground for the rest of my life
like a worm or a mole.

why have i been writing separate lines like in poems while I'm really talking in the vilest commonplace prose? it is quite silly really. someone once said i could write poetry. but i cannot. does emphatic negativity add to poetry? well, not in mine, because i cannot write poems. my little lies only make them worse.
i shall speak like i normally speak from now on. and tell the truth too. and if there is something i don't wanna tell, i shall simply omit it. i hate to type. but people do not read paper. i am not even sure i want to make people read this, but this is just for me. i shall come back to this page on screen again. but if i really write, the words will slowly disappear on yellowing sheets... and i shall forget where i kept them.
i live in a normal house and a normal room. our flat does not have a basement. it is, in fact, on the first floor... with a little below us and a lot above.
typing is funny. i never remember to use caps, or get rid of the occasional sms-ese considered unfit for anything other than orkut conversation and, well, short messages.
my voter ID says i am Tisha Ray and my birth certificate claims i am 19.
i have a handsome big brother and parents- both of them. they told me that when dada was little and i was on my way, they would ask him if he wanted me, and he would say "baby bon nebo"!!!
sex determination is illegal here, but my little big bro cracked it somehow.
i arrived in 1987 on a very rainy day. and they named me Tisha. I do not know what it means, but i like it because it sounds good somehow, and because it goes well with my surname.
dada could cover the entirety of anything i ventured to write, because he is all over my present life and past memories.
i wonder why i am writing something like an autobiography at 19... maybe it is because now i am pretty much by myself, in my room that i tried to pass off as our basement. maybe it is because i have prolonged hours of leisure, or maybe, because dada is an expensive phone call away in a different continent. writing to him is not like talking to him.
so i am storing my words. these words i never paid heed to earlier. but now i have to hold on to them before they can slip away. i am , for the first time, reading my own spoken words.
i am learning to speak to myself.

August 2006