i.

It’s startling what time does to everything, including our bodies. Like an unwashed bitter leaf, it seeps bitterness into every part of us. And like the popular okporoko fish, it enriches and replenishes our flavour.

I’m sitting on my bed, doing what I know best – reliving the past – with intricate deftness. It isn’t my fault that my brain dexterously whips up memories, both imagined and real. Nor is it my fault that it weaves them like ivie, red, glistening coral beads, strung with perfect care. Sometimes, it erupts into a depressing monument, and other times, into an overflowing ecstasy.

 

ii.

“There’s a place not far away… a place that has a friend for everyone.” – Asa

My sisters and I call our house on Okeogun Street, “Fagboyegun,” after the landlord. It’s the same way we name the rooms in our father’s house after familiar labels: Baba’s room, Daddy and Mummy’s room, Computer’s room, and Our room. Even though my father, out of astonishment, once warned us that Baba, his late father, no longer had a room, we continued anyway. Old habits never die. We had done the same at Fagboyegun, the house that witnessed our births and coming of age, that exchanged our rent for community, a gift that we would later mourn.

At first, it was fun packing up from the house, trip after trip. Then, it wasn’t. Fagboyegun house held indelible memories in its quaint hands: my sisters’ births, untold moments of childhood brazenness, and a series of firsts: the first time I learned to eat cashew with a precise, artistic flair; the first time I stole 20 naira to splurge on ‘4-for-5 naira’ sweets; and the first time I fiddled with broom-and-paper jotters knitted with curiosity. But time scuttled past, heaving us away, and Fagboyegun soon became a repository of tangible and abstract reminiscences, etched to my heart like permanent tattoos.

Although our attachment to a place is sometimes inexplicable, the heart always understands the language of home, much like the unfaltering bond between mother and child. My siblings and I often pleaded with our mum to visit the four-bedroom apartment, nestled between a secondary school and the High Court – relics of a failed government. On the days she managed to honour our requests, our heads would peek out of the car windows as we caught glimpses of the first floor, now towering in neglect. Veering out of the street, we would be plunged into a muffled, wistful drive. In hindsight, if we’d had the opportunity, we might have sniffed the house or perhaps plucked it, like the red, tender hibiscus flowers that lined the roadsides. But, unknown to our nascent minds, the mesmeric house flailed in melancholy.

Stories are shrouded in time. They require time to unfold like a piece of rumpled thread or to burst open like fresh palm fruits. At Fagboyegun, my siblings and I were oblivious to the snarling threats that hung over us, threats stirred by speculations about the landlord’s involvement in a number of political and royal controversies. Amid the looming danger, we did not know that my brittle mother once had to climb onto a stool so I could be passed into the arms of a waiting neighbour across the fence. We did not also realise that the eerie controversies had spurred our imminent evacuation.

Even so, the crumbling house that stood on the dusty street, wrapped in gruesome tales, still whispered home. And the nostalgia, which birthed visits to the house that once breathed our names, became a quiet foretelling of the person I would become: someone who clings to moments like a stubborn tick. A blessing and a curse.

 

iii.

“Change is constant,” they say. The constant proportionality, k, in a mathematical equation.

I’ll be clocking a new age, marking a pristine season like the boisterous harmattan that heralds the yuletide. Just as the proverbial pot, that collects stories at every life’s juncture, I too will be adorned with accrued wisdom. But if dread had a name, it would be birthdays. We eagerly pray, “With long life and prosperity wilt thou satisfy me,” hands and eyes lifted to the blue-silk sky in intense devotion. However, no one teaches you how to hurl peace into the gloomy crevices of your mind. Nor how to shun the unseemly visitor, awakened by comparison and society’s prickly voice.

Although I’ve yet to grow into new clothes and shoe sizes, I’ve settled into fresh, spontaneous habits. Lately, I stare into the tall mirror of my corridor, quiet fear sprouting like weeds. Is my face beating into its middle-aged form? Wasn’t I just a child some years ago? My awry thoughts stare back at me. Some days, they keep me from approaching my one-time teenage companion. Even so, there is little anyone can do to prevent nature from whooping the body. It is adept at dismantling every part except the bristling mind.

My younger self was always rife with time. How cruel it is that time condenses faster than ice cubes. Like the sun, it refuses our desperate pleas to pause so we might fulfil every promise and pledge. To ourselves. To those we cherish. To our incubated future. I’m still rife with time. Yet, like the menacing secretary in a government office, time appears intent on brewing our bodies alongside our unease.

So, on my birthday eve, whilst my sister’s voice riddles with enthusiasm, I conjure a wish that someone would ask me my age one last time before midnight strikes. This wish isn’t laced with joy, but with grief, buckets of grief at the finality of time. And at the seeming evaporation of desires, ones that once steamed like heated oil, now quietly rising into the tired cosmic air, possibly to vanish.

Oh, to be loved. To even grow jaded beneath the blankets of love. But silence does not respond only to fools; it responds to wishes like this, too.

 

iv.

“Everything passes as time passes; not even one thing you see will stay put.” – Green

I’m sprawled across my bed, ruffled by stress. Sometimes, I wonder if my apprehension about adulthood and its inherent pressures is steeped in the abyssal fear of responsibility. But I’ve come to reason that, if nature must breed within us, then stress becomes inevitable, only manageable.

While I mindlessly scroll through Instagram – one of my many stress cushions – a bank commercial bursts across my screen. It unleashes a range of faces, mouthing verses about dreams. My brain conjures childhood memorabilia, unknotting simple moments and joys at Fagboyegun. I search time, but this fickle vapour is lost in the pockets of grief — grieving dreams, grieving people, grieving moments.

Soon, tears pour down like a leaking faucet, tributes to time, age, and their precariousness. They remind me that 2007 is not a year I can cradle twice.

 

v.

“There’s a place I long to be… where… the people think about everything that makes… dream come true… simple as a child’s heart.” – Asa

The fear of aging is the beginning of wisdom. It’s no wonder my parents are intentional about their choices, sometimes imposing them on my sisters and me – a little exercise here, reduced sugar there. An endless, monotonous circle, I suppose.

As I grow older, however, I’ve come to realise that this fear, no matter how subliminal, shapes our decisions at certain ages. We not only begin to tend to our tripartite selves, but to our dreams, especially those nurtured when life bloomed carefree like gentle streams. When life echoed our names in undercurrents, unfettered by impossibilities.

In retrospect, there was something profound about those times, about the magnitude of the concocted ambitions. Maybe it has to do with the childlike innocence, or the notion that we held and would always hold the world at our fingertips. At least, that’s what was crammed into us everywhere at home, church, and school.

I’ve since tried to preserve the sanctity of mine and the heart that birthed them. Like when I didn’t get that desired grade or faced rejection, I attempted squashing them in a box, as though collecting flying termites in the shrubby Fagboyegun compound. I’ve tried to bewitch them too, pleading that they abide with me like a mother grasping her abiku child. That they illuminate my indigent eyes and line them like lodestars. Some days, they hearken and burn blazingly. Other days, they dissolve before sunrise, as though shy to accommodate me, a stranger.

I’m no longer a lot of things, some of which leave me stunned. Perhaps it has to do with time engaging in a natural detox or me communing with its embodied wisdom. I’m no longer the seven-year-old girl who moved houses and hummed along to bank commercials in the breezy evenings. I’m a twenty-something-year-old woman who’s come to understand that the danger of neglect, even for a short while, is regret and irredeemable loss, like the archetypal Lot’s wife.

It is for this reason I now measure my trust with a teaspoon. I exercise more, trailing in my parents’ steps. I’ve chosen to set myself loose from the wagered timeline. To anoint my fragile, triadic self with delicate fragrances. To ignore the raging voice of comparison and self-contempt.

So, I am leaving a prelude to time. This is for when my heart lurches into harrowing longings for the past. This prelude is scrawled in Asa’s soulful verse and bellowed by the Crafter of Time Himself: “Wouldn’t you take my hand and let me lead? Wouldn’t you rather trust me?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash