Amanda Borquaye

Introduction

Ninth Letter is honored to feature Amanda Borquaye’s essay “Wayward,” which is the Disquiet International Literary Award’s Nonfiction Prize winner for 2026.

Though “Wayward” takes place almost entirely in a cab taking Borquaye from a dance club to her home, this short ride is filled with more than a few telling side trips of memory. Borquaye may appear to be sitting alone in the backseat, but she is sharing the ride with her extended family: Ghanaian-Americans who have strong opinions about whether she is “wayward” or not, or has been, or someday will be.

And what is this “wayward,” exactly? Wayward is the path that protects you from unconventionality, from the strong pull of being different, from the fate of being circled by gossip. Yet while the fear of being wayward is something that must be unlearned, it is also a reminder that “I am someone’s hopes and dreams because this world deprived them of their own.”

At the end of the ride, Borquaye’s app announces, “You have arrived at your destination.” But where is that, really? That there are no easy answers is a testimony to the emotional complexities and the empathetic wisdom of this prize-winning essay.

—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large

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Wayward

by Amanda Borquaye

I climbed into the back of his car after the sky had turned black and the scent of friends’ cigarette smoke had long since slumbered into my hair. A similar routine ensued. The man beamed from the driver’s seat and stated rather than asked, “Young lady, you are from Ghana.” I answered him with a chuckle and a grin, hoping he wouldn’t ascribe the stench of Marlboro Reds to me. “Yes, uncle.” Wayward is the word aunties and uncles often use, to describe a child who is deviant in some way. Usually, being deviant just means exploring who you are outside who your relatives have dreamt and expected you to be. It’s a serious affliction that renders you as gossip or speculation that someone has prayed to some false god for your downfall in life out of envy. The wayward became a musician instead of a lawyer. The wayward dropped out of medical school to travel the world. When a child becomes wayward, an auntie will say, “My enemies have succeeded.” Waywardness is dynamic in that way, defining not just the wayward one, but the people tasked with keeping them from becoming that way. Wayward, then, is categorized by a deliberate decision to do things differently, to advance on a path charted for you and then decide, seemingly suddenly, to go off course, lured by the adventure of unconventionalities.

He is smiling at me, so maybe he can’t smell the cigarette stench and maybe I shouldn’t worry about whether this fleeting interaction with this man I do not know but do know because he is a constellation of many men who I have loved and who have loved me will end with him thinking I am a wayward. I have a lifelong fear of being described as such, which has seeped into a lengthy and embarrassing journey of unlearning alcohol, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’roll as bad. I envision this man calling up my parents to tell them I reek of cigarettes, wondering if he also pronounces it with a “z” sound at the beginning. I envision him embellishing the tale, like the aunties on the other end of my mother’s phone always do. “And then she was staggering into the car because she was so drunk! And I think I was even dropping her at some man’s house.” On the other end of the line would be my parents, incapable of seeing me as anything other than a baby, or worse, their baby, incredulously shouting eihhhh, lacing their hands together on the top of their heads in dismay. I am an adult but in the presence of aunties and uncles, I understand myself to be a child who is mindful of her elders. I do feel wayward, but not in the way that was whispered about when relatives from Ghana would phone my mom to report on the latest headache their child was giving them. “I want them to be like your girls, Auntie Ama.”

Once, my childhood best friend Shruti and I ran outside on the verge of tears when boys came up to us at someone’s fourteenth birthday party at the country club in the gated community neither of us lived in but everyone else did. We grew up behind those gates, our adolescence tracked by summers at the pool tying triangle bikini tops and wondering if our girlhood was supposed to grow into something we had to sneak away. We felt their hands first, reaching for our waists or hips because they didn’t know the difference. A body was a body. Justin Timberlake and Timbaland’s “Carry Out” bumped from the speakers, and as the hands got lower and lower we looked to each other, panicked, confused, wanting to laugh and wanting to cry. She had Indian immigrant parents and a similar phobia of being a wayward girl who becomes fodder for aunties to gossip about. Two years later when she starts sneaking away with the boy from a different school and a different town we saw while walking laps at a tennis meet, she’ll find me before school lets out and the Savannah summer saunters in. “What was it like?” (kissing him). “So saliva-y,” she’ll say with disgust. I’ll feel proud of her for reaching this milestone for both of us. I’ll feel betrayed by her for her early realization that the things we were taught were bad weren’t bad, for acquiescing to the ordinary we knew we were supposed to resist.

Our parents bonded quickly when we first became friends in the sixth grade. Though from different cultures, they faced a common enemy: American children and their American ways, talking to their parents anyhow, caring more about how they dressed and what they looked like than about school, prioritizing their friends over their families who had labored for them to attend this nice school. When gratitude and respect looks like deference and obedience, anything to the contrary is catastrophic. For Shruti, the threat of becoming wayward meant strict parents, but for my parents, it manifested as crippling fear I took care not to incite and inherited instead.

The Uber driver uncle looks at me in the rearview mirror like my father does. As introverts, sometimes our father-daughter car rides are characterized by silence, a mutual gratitude for the music being played, or a shared concentration on the news. I am remembered back to being a little girl on the rare days his work hours allowed him to pick me up from school, how his eyes darted frantically from the road ahead of us to my round face drooping with sleep. “Are you okay, puku?” I answered with nods instead of words. The Uber driver uncle smiles at me and I feel startled by my reflection in his mirror, how I am different from who I thought I would and should be at this age. His warmness indicates he isn’t judging me, but in fifteen minutes or so I will emerge from his car under a starless sky, walk delicately so as not to wake my neighbors on the ground floor, wipe eyeliner from my face in big black streaks and search for someone I am want to know in my reflection.

In a way, the wayward tries to straddle the rickety bridge between homeland and home. The wayward is given the benefits of homeland: a strong community and a mandate to succeed in life because someone has toiled for you to have the foundation. These begin to feel less like benefits and blessings and more like burdens when the wayward teeters away from homeland and finds themselves home: a place you fully understand but one that remains puzzled by you, a place that expects your upward mobility but cannot conceive of your worth beyond the systems and institutions that have harmed you. You can opt out if you want to, but the generation before you built that bridge you are teetering on, and place, this place, wears it down. My mom and dad didn’t want us to be wayward, of course, but they understood they had chosen to make our home America. They are not American but Americanized, so they knew that when my sister sailed to Croatia with a man she had just met in Italy, she wasn’t being wayward. She was just trying to have a memorable study abroad experience. This understanding came with further time and understanding of America and what it permits children to do.

When my little big sister was seventeen and cell phones were not a thing and even if they had been, we couldn’t have afforded one, her friends and her went to Cielo Vista Mall, giving their afternoon away to alternative music waywards might like, like Metallica or the Smashing Pumpkins. Dinnertime came, and they piled into Jorge’s car to eat wings at Hooters. Amazed by how tasty the wings were, my little big sister used her allowance money to buy enough to bring back home for everyone to try. She had a strict curfew, and with no cell phone, she couldn’t alert our parents that she was on her way. Hooters. My mother had heard of this place — a strip club or brothel of sorts. A destination only waywards would patronize. Why had her daughter gone there, and why did American kids find this establishment an appropriate hang-out? I envision them as they were then: a young girl, the first in her family to experience girlhood in America, who figured it was easier to embrace this place rather than fear it. What her mother found objectionable, she understood as ordinary. And our mother, a woman who knew the capacity for evil this place holds, especially to young Black girls. A woman who had tried her best to raise another child here and seeing how inhospitable it was, sent her back to her homeland where she could be better cared for. My little big sister wasn’t a wayward for enjoying the wings at Hooters. I think of the wings lying in their unopened in a styrofoam box, the sauce soaking the sides and staining the whole thing red, the fury of our mother rattling them as if the chickens could come back to life, trembling in regret for even being alive to be killed and turned into wings that her daughter would go to the probably strip-club-brothel to eat. Then the wings would speak, make alive the temptation to chew on them to the bone, until every last shred of meat had been softened by saliva, swallowed down deep — Try it, it isn’t going to hurt you, see how good? The reprimand my little big sister received is canon status in our household over twenty-five years later. I know the story in detail not because I was conscious enough to have witnessed it but because it was a paradigm shift of sorts. Something that we can all hopefully laugh at now that our mother has proof that her children can turn out okay in a place like this, that kids come home late, that childhood has the capacity for fun and not just obedience. I empathize for them, girlhoods defined by duty. Girlhoods yearning for softer womanhoods than what was inherited.

The night is quiet with the exception of a throwbacks radio station barely turned on in the background. The beat sounds like Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” and I wonder if the Uber uncle driver also mistakes his name to be “Lee Wayne” as my parents do. I feel conscious of how I am dressed. A sheer black top I have to shimmy down to keep my boobs from peering out underneath. I FaceTimed my mom before heading out, her eyes sparkling and mouth babbling about the days when she too couldn’t wait for the weekend to don her bell bottoms and showyourback top to dance until roosters crowed. Clothing is another sign of waywardness. Sometimes the offense is as simple as dressing unconventionally or getting a tattoo or a piercing in places where people should not be pierced, which for tattoos is anywhere and for piercings is anywhere other than your earlobes. I have stacked as many as my tiny ears will accommodate, three on each side. Sometimes, I want to pierce my belly button, my knotty center that keeps me together. I want to have a home for my dread, to keep it preciously tucked away in my navel. Other times I want to showcase it to the world as something appealing and glimmering. A wayward is just a person until shame and condemnation get married and give them that title.

You can sniff out the waywards by what music they listen to. When my mom was a young party girl, she got to see one of her beloved bands perform. Recalling how their dreadlocks swung low to the ground, she said she felt possessed with the urge to grab them and swing on them. In a world that expects quietness and gratitude from immigrants, anything loud and brash sends out a shockwave of panic for taking up more space than we realize we can occupy. I am always shrinking into whatever crevices the world offers me. I think that’s why I’m drawn to music like this — it is an outward manifestation of the me the world refuses to accommodate or see. I stand in the pit at a Soul Glo show as Pierce Jordan’s voice shreds through my earplugs. Soul Glo is a predominantly Black hardcore/punk band, but still, I am a fleck in the sprinkling of people of color present. I am surrounded by largely male bodies that heave and swing their limbs wildly, a billowing of bodies I contemplate joining, knowing the circle of people around us will bounce me back to my feet should I fall. Anointed hands raise a body and pass it overhead like it is meant for the heavens. I yearn to be blessed by these hands, to be passed to any place but here. It is wayward to want to wail with people you don’t know. It is wayward to desire the brief crumpling of your body against a stranger’s, to feel welcomed by the salt of their sweat scenting the air. I imagine the transfer of our individual rage multiplying into kinetic energy each time a body bounces off another in the pit, how it becomes our collective rage. Is it wayward to seek joy from rage? This is the gaze. The moment when I occupy myself in this space where I am made aware of my woman-ness, my Blackness, sometimes, my age. And then I am a retina inside of my mother, or an auntie, or this uncle, watching myself incredulously. Why am I throwing my body around like that? Why are screams from the depths of hell melodic or consumable to my ears? Pierce Jordan screams even louder than the guitars, and his voice lands with a rapid, fiery urgency:

Can I live? Can I live?

Can I live? Can I live?

Can I pull out the needles I’ve been stuck with?

His question feels existential and material all at once. One has to wonder can they live, materially survive in the world, when everything feels engineered to kill or deplete you, when everything we need to survive, water, air, land, has been sold, destroyed, and poisoned. The perpetual state of rage, the rage I throw around at these shows, is rooted in an existential haunting — I cannot ask if I can live even when the material conditions of the world suggest I cannot and should not. My life has cost something(s) to someone(s), and I need to yank the needles I’ve been stuck with out. In the music, I am confronted with what I struggle to reconcile: why shroud myself in anthems of defiance when we are trained to be a people of deference and gratitude, to be quiet and anything but troublesome? What exactly do I, in my brief and privileged life, have to be so angry for? I was a child bubble-wrapped in love and devotion. My mother scrawled declarations of her love for me on slips of yellow and white paper torn from my father’s legal pads to tuck into my lunch bag every day. By the time I came around in our family tree, money flowed, time was abundant, fear had released some of its grip that manifested in parental panic and rage. But as Cathy Park Hong illuminates with her notion of “minor feelings”, there is nowhere to put all of these feelings, which are minimized by a cultural script that asserts stories of individuals overcoming their racial or structural origins as retribution. Minor feelings are cumulative. They build and build over time until you are a quiet immigrant daughter, screaming, cussing, and kicking because people are always saying how successful your kind of immigrant is, how successful you are, but you feel like a failure.

I wonder how the Uber driver knows I am Ghanaian. It must be something about my face, though I’m not sure what exactly. It is a replica of my father’s, a sharp-ish jaw cradled by round-ish cheeks, small eyes, and little ears that, to my mother’s delight, I cannot cram with piercings, and a chin where just before God released us to His corrupted creation, He took the firm butt of a pencil, poked a dot in the center and stood back smiling with approval before sending us off. This man’s certainty suggests a precise feature I must be unaware of, something so glaringly evident to him in the few minutes he has scanned my face as he drives against the night. I can also tell us apart in a crowd of faces — the West Africans from the East Africans and the Southern Africans. It is an inherited instinct that operates on familiarity rather than any science. In his own face, I see a map of lines, of longitudes and latitudes. Twice daily, I slather the skin around my eyes with snail secretions to avoid creases and fine lines. Yolanda tells me it’s important to start young, but I look to these lines in elders as a sign of their kindness, of all the times they have laughed because joy ceased them and of all the times they’ve laughed to keep from crying.

I look to the lines in the driver’s face to see how they stretch, pointing me to where we both originally belong and illustrating where we have ended up. A spirit of stratification separates us even as we try to cling to this familiarity. I wonder what his life was like back in Ghana and if he misses how the Harmattan winds disperse red dust particles that sliver into unsuspecting nostrils and find new homes. In the late hours of the night as his body tires and his eyes narrow with sleep as he wills himself to say awake to drive drunken millennials home, I bet a memory holds him. Like tulip petals, it must unfold and splay right there across his brain. Or maybe it is as prickly as a pin, a nagging reminder of why he chose to come here. My heels did not spend their early days greeted by the warmth of the Earth, covered in clay kisses like I imagine his were. They were scalded by burning asphalt where palm fronds offered little shade and food offered an excess of sugar and sodium. I want to locate myself in his face the way he did so quickly with me. I fear when that will no longer be possible, what it will mean for me to not be remembered back to my homeland. There is a comfort to being found by your people. At a shopping mall, an auntie is shoe shopping with her daughter. I recognize they are speaking Twi, but I cannot announce myself in that language. I listen carefully to their conversation in shame that I have found them but I cannot be found by them. At some point the hyphen in Ghanaian-American will dissolve like old stitches, and what was once a gaped wound demanding care will be a scar of unknown origin, raised on the skin and able to be soothed with the quick pass of a thumb.

My sister watches my Instagram story after I attend a Deftones concert, a band I’ve adored since a guy on my hall freshman year of college scratched out the opening of “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” on his guitar, the chords floating down the hall and around the corner to my room, arriving glittery and heavy. I imagine her on her couch with my dog nephew, Jax, his wagging tongue and her glam manicure pausing to direct message me regarding this wayward behavior: Amanda?! Blood of Jesus. As if Jesus wouldn’t be in the pit too. In the few seconds that managed to offend her sensibilities, Chino Moreno darts up and down the stage, hurtling himself into an impressive vertical off the top of a boxy amplifier that catches him. I forget it has a purpose besides being a launchpad for his movement, the chaos colliding within him and exploding. I track his movements by watching his feet, pink and yellow Nike Cortezes that stand out against his now sweat-soaked white tee, below-the-waist black pants, and glinting gold chain. He has a masterful way of wrapping the microphone cord around his wrist, ferrying it through his fingers like a magician doing a string trick. He drapes the cord around his neck like a snake, like he is Britney Spears at the VMAs but for nu-metal fans. When he came out on stage, he had a black overshirt on. At some point it came off, and now he chugs some water and sprays it into the air as an elephant does to cool itself off with its trunk. Time is frozen. I see the threads of water just before gravity yanks them back down onto his face. The droplets cling to the spiky hairs on his scalp that have become blades of morning grass with dew. Some fans at the front are crowd-surfing and I am reminded that we are not in some rock venue or dingy club where this sort of debauchery is commonplace. We are at Capital One Arena. I peer around to see if event staff will mandate the crowdsurfers stand on their own feet like the rest of us, but Chino is screaming again, wailing as he closes out “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and bodies open up, hungry for the start of a mosh. Necks noodle to defiant guitar riffs, limbs tweaking and thrashing. A petite event staff lady taps my back, and I hope she isn’t the one they’ve sent to break things up. I once frantically searched for my short friend in a mosh, grabbing every small brown-haired white girl until she showed up unharmed behind me, grinning and ready to go in again. The event staffer is unconcerned by the chaos brewing and offers to throw the tray of chicken tenders and fries I hesitantly bought (because $17 is far too much but somehow they ended up being $29) in the trash so I don’t lose my spot. A man in an eyepatch next to me has filmed most of the show on his phone. The grids of the camera shift slightly to track Chino’s face every time he moves. I wonder if in the midst of the euphoria I am witnessing on stage, the running and jumping and shouting and stripping of overshirts and microphone cord wrangling, the band knows that they are being watched with such stillness, devotion and care.

The man with an eyepatch and I share many glances throughout. When Chino wondrously shifts from belting in his tenor range to a growl he has to summon from someplace deep, bending his body in half to get it out, we lock eyes in shared amazement. We exchange minimal words. “Were you alive when this came out?” he finally asks when delectable drum fills kick in before scratchy guitars accent it and the band starts performing “Around the Fur.” I was one. The set ends a few songs later. We wait for an encore that doesn’t come. Swaying against the sweat soaked white tee is a glinting gold chain, drooped like a vine, bowing.

As an offering of familiarity, I am mindful to remove the grating “r” sound in the rhotic American accent when I speak to the driver, a type of immigrant kid code switching I learned from a young age after visiting Ghana for the first few times. The kids in my grandma’s neighborhood would chase my sisters and I shouting “arr-arr-arr” to mimic how the horrid accents from the land of Coca-Cola sound. Pirates from across the Atlantic. Some of the homes on grandma’s street protected themselves with the glass shards of broken soda bottles menacingly poking out from pastel front gates and concrete walls. I always thought of them as art installations, admiring how the sun winked off of the multi-colored fragments.

I let myself relax in his car. I like how his laughter seems to ricochet and fill the space between us. We talk about Ghana’s 2022 World Cup performance, how the boys tried their very best, how we may not have won or even come close, but at least we didn’t come in last. Because when you come from where we do, you are used to being last. Others cast you in that role, and sometimes you take the bait in wanting to prove them wrong before recalling that a life spent proving is an exhausting one. You cling to moments of visibility, like having had a UN Secretary General in a world where Western hegemony renders such a position useless. You are used to being a fleeting face in the background as people bark a food order to you, or toss another dish in the sink and send soapy suds flying, or slam the door shut after you’ve safely delivered them home. The martyrs of the American Dream™. On the other end are the poster children of the American Dream™ — the ones whose worth always returns to, resides within, the very systems and institutions that harm them and their own. The story of respectability is one of empire I feel forced to inherit by virtue of being in this country rather than any sort of familial imposition. I once received the highest award for students at my university, and as it was being presented, I was described as being “one generation removed from poverty.” I stayed up the entire night, the moon dancing light off of the glass paperweight with my name engraved on it and casting shadows on my dorm room walls. I pretended they were the shadows of my parents. I invited the fuzziness of their outlines to become sharper, focused, so that they can be something other than characters named poverty and struggle in a nation’s storybook, so that they are not seen as an old, dreary past and I, in all my apathy and paralysis that they could not afford to have, am seen as a departure from that past, never quite arriving at a promising new future.

He thinks I’m still in college. The twenty-seven-year-old is our baby, my mom and dad always say, and somehow the people on the other end don’t erupt in laughter staring at me, the woman in front of them being passed off as a baby. I know this uncle sees me as a baby of sorts too. Comparatively speaking, I’m sure the life I’ve lived so far is infantile compared to his own. We chat about what brought me to Washington DC. I tell him I finished my studies in international law and diplomacy, and he gasps with a pride that feels hyperbolic but that I know is sincere.

“We are so proud of you,” he says. “You are doing things we were not able to. God will bless you.” I want to ask him why God should bless me for doing what is expected of me. I had a reasonable set of expectations laid out to me at a young age. Go to school, have a successful career, marry a man with a similarly successful career, and supply a roster of grandchildren. This to-do list still looms ahead of me and taunts me as something I want to actualize while at once being something I want to retreat from entirely as I writhe through a world that continues to expand beyond these predetermined destinations my eyes were fixed on for so long. I am doing not what the generations before me were unable to do, but what they were not afforded to do. I can’t let a dream in deferral die, but sometimes I want to.

I have an uncle by blood who used to live in America too, presumably because he wanted to make a living so he could make a life. His smile is like my grandma’s, deposited in a warm face with high cheekbones. When I think of him I see big bicep muscles, a dark durag covering his head, the smell of menthol cigarettes and fresh soap resting in his clothes. I’m not sure if demeanor is by nature or nurture, but his is one that I think immigrants have drilled into themselves or have had drilled into them by their friends or relatives who have already made it to “abroad.” Do not be troublesome. Do not question authority or position yourself at odds with it. Be quiet, and take as little space as you can in this big and vast country. This is how you can make a living. This uncle became wayward. I say became and not is. “No one comes to this Earth to be useless,” is something my mom often says. He pricked his skin to touch euphoria and spent so much of his time in and out of jail, my mother scrambling to bail him out in fear of what would happen to him there. When they sent him back, my mother was relieved. He told her if he really had to go, he would jump from the plane, so I don’t know whether it is a blessing or deeply tragic that he was shackled for the flight. At least he’d stay alive. I wonder how he reflects on those days now, if he ever asked can I live?, if he felt the sting of every needle he had been stuck with in life, so it made no difference for him to stick himself.

My other uncle, Uncle K, came to stay with us when we were little girls, creatures clamoring into his bed and stuffing our noses in the compendium-sized books he always quietly read or sitting crisscrossed on the floor while he selected reggae CDs to play on the boombox. I can only assume he came because he wanted to get by, to make a life. The best days were Burger King days, when we’d stop by the drive-through after school to see him at the window, his wide smile and his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in laughter at the sight of his sister and his nieces. We always received pie we never ordered. Three Hershey’s sundae pies cooling a corner of the bag in secrecy. Uncle K tried to get by and make a life from what I can tell. He is in our family vacation photos from when I was a girl. He was the go-to snake eradicator when my sister and I threw our bikes down in fear at the sight of a snake scooting up the driveway toward our make-believe metropolis. We watched him with such fascination. He washed the cars and we let the soapy water gather at our feet and splash. He mowed the lawn row by row until the taste of Earth clung to the backs of our throats. He even had a girlfriend or two. All the makings of a life. In the end, he was fired from Burger King, and for the longest time I believed it was for sneaking us too many pies. In the end, he left just as quickly as he’d arrived.

This we the driver uncle speaks on behalf of feels as if I am standing on a stage and a council of uncles and aunties, none of whom are blood relatives of mine, grant me a standing ovation for completing a bare minimum. I notice myself crying in the back of his car, clinging to this we, my roaming drove of guardian angels who do not know me yet love me, are proud of me, urge me to keep persisting, to make us proud. In them, I see my parents, and in me they see a collective daughter, a dream forgone, reborn, an affirmation and confirmation that it was worth it to come here. I try to be less mathematical about it all, to understand my life as something other than evidence or proof. I want to tell him I’m sorry. I’m sorry that my life is a reminder of what those who came before me did not have the chance or opportunity to do. I’m sorry that that seems to overwhelm me so much that sometimes I’d rather not have a life at all. I am sorry that so often when the first generation arrives here for a better life, they almost always mean a better life for their next generations, and they will work until death to ensure it. I’m sorry that things were supposed to get better, but sometimes it feels like they’ve stayed the same. I do not relish in my dreams and what they mean for who I am becoming. In them I see something devilish, a reminder that I am someone’s hopes and dreams because this world deprived them of their own. I am sorry that this land of individuality has told me that my dreams are for me and me only.

I want to say these things to him, but just as quickly as he arrived, he is departing.  I tip him in the app. I unbuckle myself. I unbuckle the cloud of smoke and shame I carried in with me. They finally leave me, and I sit with darkness on the sidewalk outside of my home until a sudden but familiar sorrow comes and clouds my eyes. I check the Uber app again: “You have arrived at your destination.” I offer a prayer that he does too. The keys are ready in my hand, the teeth of the one for the front lock gnawing into the fleshy part of my palm. In the morning, I wake to see the key still in the door, and I laugh, thinking of my mother who always asks if I locked the door behind me. I always tell her no, of course I left it in the door with a sign saying ‘come on in!’. And then I laugh again, thinking of a council of aunties and uncles entering behind me throughout the night. Their colorful cloth turning my home into a field of wildflowers. Uncles cheering with Guinness until sunrise. Aunties scolding me when I stumble out of bed in an oversized t-shirt and no bottoms and my hair all basabasa. And I let them stay as long as they’d like. I greet them all. Finally, they’ve arrived at a door that hasn’t closed for them.

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