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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