This Easter weekend began like a soft hymn, sung in the quiet of dawn. We packed our bags with light hearts and heavier hopes, driving westward into the undulating hills of Kisoro — a place where the clouds seem to rest gently on the shoulders of mountains, and the air smells of both memory and moss. It was a trip threaded with laughter and the kind of silence only family can share, where presence alone is enough. 

I spent hours — maybe days, if you counted by heartbeats — crouched by roadside wildflowers, photographing petals slick with dew, leaves blushing under the kiss of morning rain. There was something sacred about it, something that reminded me that the world, in all its chaos, still knew how to be beautiful.

But beauty, as we know, is not immune to interruption.

On the road back to Kigali, just as the sun began to soften its gaze on the hills, a truck — that monstrous creature of iron and forgetfulness — came skidding towards us around a corner. I remember the moment stretching, folding, bending like the breath before an argument. I swerved, instinct leading where thought could not. Off the road, into gravel and prayer. But still, the truck’s anger found us — crashing into the back of our car like a closing fist. The bumper, that simple thing, was lost.

Then came the bureaucracy of misfortune — the police called with their notebooks and chalk lines, the measuring tapes stretched like the fingers of blame, insurance numbers exchanged like worn currency. The ritual of post-accident civility.

We made it back to Kigali. It was Monday, a public holiday. A cruel irony — a day off that gave me no rest. And today, Tuesday the 22nd, I found myself in line again, filing an insurance claim that already carries the stain of error. A wrong entry. A name misspelled. A date misplaced. Mistakes that belong to someone else, but that I must now carry.

And just when I thought bureaucracy had exhausted its arsenal, life handed me a quieter chaos. A call from my landlord — a woman with a sharp voice and softer intentions — announcing, without ceremony, that she would need her house back. A month’s notice. One month. Thirty days to fold a life into boxes, to unpin dreams from walls, to find another place where the ceilings don’t leak and the neighbors don’t judge. 

And I thought: how absurd it is, how tragically absurd, that in the span of days, one can go from photographing flowers in the rain to calculating the price of a lost bumper and the cost of an unplanned eviction. But perhaps that is what it means to live. To hold both peace and inconvenience in the same hands. To marvel. To mourn. And then, to begin again.