WHAT SHALL WE DO TOMORROW?

I do not want to lie on that final bed – the one from one which neither you nor I will rise again – and find myself unable to shake this singular thought out of my head: ‘Dike, how would it have felt beneath your bare feet, the grass outside this window?’ You know? How everyone stays on ‘The Path’? I do not want to lie there thinking softly – Why did I stay on The Path? You know? How they wink at night, our flickering dreams? On and off, like fireflies, so people watching say you’re not…realistic, the way you go chasing after things that carry no guarantee of being caught.

What’s the point? I ask in return.

Of waking up? If the sun will only travel the same course, and set in the same place – what’s the point in waking up? Once, you see, I was a child. Now, I have one. And, soon, they will have theirs, and I would have become the grandfather vaguely remembered in the quaint features I only acquired in old age. Imagine it. To become a blurred picture, a somewhat familiar name at the root of someone else’s family tree. They will not know me. Just like I will never know them, no matter how many bottles of aromatic schnapps they empty on my behalf. Yes. When the sun will only travel the exact same course, and set in the exact same place – don’t you ever wonder – what’s the point?

It is true. I will not wait till I have reached that wicked bend where the road has grown too narrow to swing my wagon around. Tonight – with the back of my head nestled in overlapping palms, and Gloria Estefan on repeat singing about days of glory, those unforgettable moments when we stretch beyond breaking to reach for the skies – I’ll think these thoughts. These damned thoughts! Tell me. Why did I work so hard at a job I never liked; stay so long in a love I hated? Stand with hands behind my back, decades and decades, with words in me I never said back? Because – you see – there, at the tipping point of earthly life (no need to wait and see) time suddenly becomes what it’s always been – irreplaceable. And why did we waste it? Afraid of the dark. Why were we so afraid of the dark, when it only held all the things we had not yet discovered?

Why?

So, I sit up tonight and dare myself to think of tomorrow with courage and faith. Yes. Before it is lost, tell me, what shall I do with it – my strength? These arms? You know? They cannot be just for feeling my way cautiously, for laying firmly on the shoulders of the person in front of me, so I can be guided, exactly, into their tired tracks? Tell me – where shall we go with these legs? Before they need covering to keep from freezing. And time walks past – silent as a thief – on its way to that place from which it never returns? Yes. Before these hands begin to tremble so badly I am no longer able to hold your beautiful face between them? Tell me, my love, what shall we do tomorrow?

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BROKEN PIECES

It is possible that you too have had an experience like this. You meet a girl. Let’s imagine we’re teenagers here, the unimaginative sweet sort still a fair number of years from the awkward first brush with sex. So, it’s mostly long strolls through dusky evenings and, once in a while, the holding of innocent hands. What you DO do constantly - is talk, as if the silence was something to be afraid of.

To be honest, for you, the silence is something to be afraid of. Because stretch it out long enough and she’ll say, “I should get going. I’m sure my mum has started looking for me”. But, one night, you sit on the bonnet of a car parked outside her compound till it is almost midnight. And afterwards, under the most brilliant moonlight you have ever seen, you run home. And the many kilometers are like nothing. All because she hugged you – it was the first time – before you set off.

Many years later, you find yourself lying on a mattress looking up at the ceiling, and it is this exact memory you’re dwelling on. Because between then and now, you have experienced the trauma of hatching, and – honestly – if you had to run home now, at midnight, you would be peering cautiously into the bordering darkness all the way, knowing there could be a million and one things lurking in there. It makes you wonder now, why you did not realize it then, just how fragile, how rare, innocence is. How could you have let it go? Just because her parents moved to a new state, and you went to a different University; and didn’t always have the time to write back. Yes. She stopped writing, eventually.

And now you think – because, in the intervening years, you have acquired the ability to compare – so now you think, “She is the best”. Do you go and look for her? You go and look for her. And they make you wait a little before you see her coming out from behind a half-open door. And, to you, it is as if the years never were, as if she was even now just slipping out of the back door of her parent’s house into a dusky evening, ready to set off on a long stroll with you, to hold innocent hands again, and talk unceasingly. But she stands quietly in front of you instead, and asks, in a quiet voice, if you remember the last time you spoke. You don’t. She does. “I told you” – she says – “I will not wait anymore for you”.

It is on that day that you learn this lesson. That Time is like the Greek proverb – “You cannot step twice in the same river”. It is NOT like how you used to take your chocolate and hide it away so that, after your brothers had finished theirs, you could bring yours out and eat it very slowly in front of them. No. You cannot do this with a perfect moment. Yes. You cannot come to a junction where the road branches right, and then say, ‘I will go Left first. And when I have tired of its adventure, I will come back to this very junction and then I will go Right’. No. You cannot do this.

Not that there is not always an unpredictable Grace hiding somewhere in the wind, bringing new seeds repeatedly for the ones we let slip through the holes in our pockets; but that - truth be told - no two happinesses are the same. And once you have looked into the eyes of Sorrow, go where you may afterwards, but you will see that you will never be able to forget it completely, what you saw in there. Yes. This is what our humanity is. Did you not know? A brilliant mosaic, made beautiful by how we arrange them – our broken pieces. So, let me say this slowly, do not miss your turning, my brother. And if you do, look ahead. And do not miss your turning.

‪#‎AbujaNSW5‬ 

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