‎I am ninety, and the world is quieter now. It is the quiet that comes at the end of wars, with the alleviation of child hunger, and the easing of the grief that follows losing family members and lovers to the horror of illness. It is also a quiet born of understanding. Understanding the woman who doesn’t want children but drives her nieces to football practice, always stocking her Hermès bag with chocolates and copies of her superhero debut children’s book which she gives out for free. Understanding the scrawny teenager who skips school to draw graffiti and skate around the municipal square, curses at police patrol vans but always clears the driveway of the septuagenarian living two streets away — to rebel and still care.
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‎My bones creak, and my eyes are foggy like my breath clouds the surface of my partner’s collection of Chinese ceramic cups, but my mind remains steeled with the same stubbornness I carried at twenty-two. Twenty-two, writing in the margins of my pharmacology notes under the full beam of my lamp about the Mona Lisa in Aso Oke, untarred Nigerian accident-prone roads, and Eurocentric beauty standards.
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‎Today, in stormy weather, I hop on a train. I am dressed in a black sequin gown. It feels ceremonial, hugging a body clothed in tattoos and piercings that accentuate the minute details of me — my split eyebrows, and the fullness of my lips. The train feels different now. It smells alien. It is polished, clean, and automated. I choose a seat beside a window and switch on the humming massager designed for the elderly. Balls of cloud stretch for miles over a country that no longer waits in fuel queues or prays against food insecurity. I remember being twenty-two and praying for light, not just electricity but a revelation. Who would I become? Where would my writing go? Would anyone remember it?
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‎At ninety, I now know I didn’t write to be remembered. I wrote to forget. To forget the life of a dark-skinned queer child in a hostile country. To forget my mother’s brows, always creased with worry. She never took the trains, but she watched me board flights of daring ambitions and hop across unfamiliar grounds; uninterested in motherhood, the Holy Trinity, and shea butter.

The train hums forward and I think of all the stations I didn’t stop at: my first writing job that drained me and didn’t pay well, the lover who claimed he had an aversion to lies, yet his words spilled two thousand of them with ease; another lover who longed for the warmth and delirium of his previous lover’s attention; parties I ghosted to write one more chapter. I have no regrets, I see versions of me waving from platforms I passed.
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Photo by Cody Board on Unsplash