| Danielle |

8

Question: longest time you've kept a workout for?

❤️

DANIELLE H--8
____________

Danielle,

Principles,

We're all taught principles,

Some more different than others.
______________

RING. RING. RING.

My phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out to see it is my mummy so I quickly nod at Howard and take the call.

"Why haven't you called yet?" Mum's voice brings back the memories of a plump woman, with an Afro full of flour, baking cupcakes with vanilla icing, that smell like sugar and flour mixed together, and placing them on the bakery rack, ready to sell and open for hungry customers.

"Sorry, mum-" 

"Ew, she says 'mum'." Danielle says and sniggers in the background as she plops herself beside me on the couch, the cigarette smell even heavier now.

"I've just been so busy..." I get up from the couch and open the doors to the balcony that has a cigarette smell wafting in the air. The air is very chilly even though there was previous burning flame which had probably made the air warm a few minutes ago.

I thought it would've been gone by now.

"Busy with Marcus I see? Shall I be expecting babies in a few months, dear?" I snigger a bit at my mum's normal forwardness then I remembered the brown haired man - my boyfriend - storming out of my room in anger with pink footsteps following his path.

Should I tell mum that my boyfriend whom we all love so much was so angry at me? Angry at me for not listening to what he said, purposely disobeying him? It's Nasedo culture for the man to always be the head of the house; I will never forget my big bellied father yelling at me and my brothers in a stern tone, his eyebrows scrunched up as we all sit at the dining table and he towers above all of us who listen attentively to the mighty quote: "The husband is the head of the..."

"Head of the wife!" We would all say in unison and he would continue the rest of the quote, nodding proudly, "wives should obey their husbands..."

"In everything." I would look to my mum who was sat opposite to my father, who says this profusely, as if no amount of strength could break what she believes.

A few years later after my eldest brother would come back from his boarding school, it was no longer dad who towered above us all during our celebratory dinner, albeit dad still said the quotes from the Bible standing up, but it was our eldest brother, who now sat opposite dad, and who spoke about how men and women should be equal and how light couldn't appear out of nowhere.

I will also never forget the look on Dads face as Samuel interrupted the prayer "you've got to be kidding me! Science debunks the whole of a Genesis. Animals can't just come because a voice said so." My brothers voice was strong and it was as if all Dad's prayers before dinner, for years, had left no meaning in my brothers head.

Dad's lips were scrunched up in fury, face as red as a tomato, eyebrows shrivelled in annoyance (though probably more for the fact that it had not been plucked in years, I tried to get him to pluck them but he always said: "do I look like a woman to you?"), his cheeks were puffed, similar to a chipmunk, and I thought they would pop any second then and that we'd have to rush to the hospital to save my dad from being cheek-less.