i) Sunday is the sort of day that persuades you the world will continue. I know this from my lungs that sip larger air. The morning looks like washed white clothes on clean white ropes, and everything goes the same. My husband, Ogie, feels like petals, like woolly pillows and smooth honey, as we do the ritual of morning hugs. We shower our sons, Onoshoke and Ikpemi, get ready for church, so we know, definitely, it cannot be us.

ii) Have you ever observed, keenly, the kitikata of a horse’s hooves riding from doom? Well, I haven’t either. But when the whole congregation lashes out in tongues, and perspiration dampens the coldness of the air conditioner, my little Ikpemi whimpering for the third biscuit, I am hanging on to concentration and consecration, lashing in my own tongues, the air thick with urgency, every one of us like horses, riding from doom.

iii) Mondays are with a different atmosphere. My legs run before I do, and it’s a good chaos when everyone agrees that madness isn’t madness. My favorite colleague, Omoruyi, always has his head buried in work, the sort you can always rely on, the sort with all the latest. So, you know, as long as he’s there, the world isn’t ending.

iv) Vividly, I recall Tuesday was with a gloomy atmosphere. People talked about nothing but the recent disappearance, the Allahu Akbar before the blasts, and the rapes. It’s a pile of dead deeds in a living world. And nobody, no being, agrees to having any ties with the beasts, as though, one day, the world stood still while the earth produced full-blown wicked species.

v) I don’t know what to allude any of it to. I scroll fast before my algorithm becomes sorrow, before I see the reflection of my country’s rot. I must detach from negativity, that my life may be star-filled nights and sun-blast noons. I must not mourn, lest I be mourned. I will water down the blood until it is but water, drink it, and call it a living stream, and ignore the skulls my nation is built upon.

vi) My son, Onoshoke, returns from school with the knowledge that, years ago, young female beings became a warehouse of bullets, assault, and endless tragedy. I take him up on the kitchen counter and tell him, “It will not be us.” The mayhem stands between the two of us, and the smell of boiling meluza fish from the neighbor waltzes into the room. I hate the smell of it. Why must we bear that which we never asked for?

vii) In this city, it rains too much, and the Red Sea seems to find its way to our street. So, we open our door to find bones and teeth. Yet this rain brings no cold, like we’re boiling-walking bodies, absorbing, cooking, until there’s a last puff, oozing out of our heads like erupting volcanoes. Calm, calm. A little now and then, the cold bites us, never in a good way.

viii) We go to work, we go to picnics, cinemas, restaurants. The world, for us, doesn’t change, like it is meant to happen to everyone but ourselves. We’re so afraid of everything but the thing fear is meant for. I know this, for the most recent news says, “School children in Oyo,” and I, a few states away, loving mother as I am (because we can never hide from it), give my kids to the smiling school teacher.

ix) The body holds too many memories, those ones before the years you realized you belong to a civilization of people, those ones your family whispered while you slept, those ones time blurs out faster. Too fast, you forget the good days, and, thank God, the pain as well. Your body remembers. It is why it shrinks, ages, while in your mind, you’re still drawn by the little things of life, like a child of the world that you are.

x) Even while your skin warned you, and your veins spiked, for they come from a long line of grief, you ignored it. You ignored the bangs. The prayers got louder, vigorously, tenaciously, unable to face what’s upon us. At that moment, we could have rewound time. The air stank with anxiety. Yet we plunged deeper, like horses, riding from doom.

xi) I know this feeling too well, the feeling of something not being its first time. Perhaps it is the ones I couldn’t scroll past, or the movies, or the dreams. I know how it goes and how it ends. I’ve imagined my life in many tragedies, but not this, not watching my Ogie’s hands fly past my eyes while I imagined if severed limbs can grow again. I didn’t know anymore then if some kept praying or if it was mourning. It has always sounded the same.

xii) They say nothing prepares you for loss, as though loss is a ghost we’ve never come across. But the world prepares you. Everything prepares you. Every red light, every hurt to the minimal of tragedies, says earth, a mother to all, has no favorite child.

xiii) I read once that the brain remains active for a short period of time after the heart dies. It is no wonder I felt every pull, belly sliced wide fulfilling psychotic fantasies, eyes plucked from their sockets, limb by limb, every cell, every empty fibre summed up to make me, me, laid open and squashed, mirroring a character in a museum being assaulted by eyes and speculations.

xiv) And I wonder if they ever feel it too, if they’ll come to understand the absurdity of it all, the only insanity you cannot mistake for sanity, that you cannot, however you may, kill a person. That our bodies are not who we are, even though on that bright, perfect Sunday morning, it became us.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by WALL KURT on Unsplash