Shell

I picked up this shell in 1997, the year I was fully remissioned from leukeamia cancer and years of kemo therapy. I picked it up from the beach in Omboué on the western coast of Gabon at the Atlantic Ocean. I picked a dozen of shells that my father carried behind me. He said I was telling him about the secrets inside the shells and you could hear all the voices of people that could not be remembered. Each shell had a story about what happened at the sea and on land. My father took the shells like they were tape recorders of people speaking under the ocean. I don’t remember this memory. My father kept them in a box for many years and brought them back 25 years later as I was unconscious on my hospital bed in December 2022. He placed each shell to my ear and said to me to listen and remember. It might have looked mad to people watching but he was the only person who knew the secret and the memory better than me. The ‘shell’ recorders stored enough vibrations and I wake up. I tell him of the visions I had from the time I was asleep in the emergency surgery. I saw people that I loved that had died and those that came from the sea. The doctors statistically said that I could not survive a brain tumour and other chronic illnesses that had hosted my body. I wasn’t suppose to wake up. You need to be in some kind of ‘madness’ to wake up like that.