ANOTHER DAY

It may take a while before you notice it - that you don't wake up as quickly as you used to, and when you do, your body aches; that you lie back in bed too many mornings staring out the window, and what you think about always makes you sigh. You see, life is a path that should twist and turn, and when it runs straight for years and years it begins to feel like someone is slowly turning the lights down inside you. Yes. Do you still remember what you wanted to be in primary school?

I wanted to climb mountains. But the last thing I remember climbing was a stool, to reach up to change a bulb, or was it to pull a file down from the top shelf? I tell you, if you do these things too many times – the mechanical motions of a life on auto-repeat – you could wake up one day and stop seeing the green in grass, or the many shades of yellow in the sunset. That used to be me, you know; star-gazer, legs dangling down the sides of my neighbor's uncompleted fence, looking up. All I ever wanted was freedom.

But the world is troubled and refuses to be healed. So, what do you do? You find a place in it and hold on tight, hoping you can make it across the middle passage safely. Build a house, while at it. Raise children. Work long enough to earn a pension. Is that life?

Sometimes, my brother, it must be. Not everyone has the luxury of alternatives. So, even if you get up tomorrow knowing you would rather be elsewhere, where do you go? This is where you are – in a job you don't like, in a house that's too small, with a man or woman you used to be madly in love with, and children who are currently too old to be 'cute' and too young to be responsible. Eh? What shall we do then?

If I was like my brother Che, or my sister-in-law, Shioke, I would wake up a little before dawn, around that time when it is still pitch-black, but not the same kind of darkness as midnight. The darkness of pre-dawn has a lightness to it, you see. I would sit in a corner with a guitar and play an old song, from the early days when I had faith in abundance, so much so I created art to store the excess. Now, I'm running a bit low. I'll listen to the songs of the younger me. For today is the day that truth is needed.

But I am no musician. True. These things don't come to me swaddled in melody, in melancholic riffs or titillating chord progressions. They come as whispered words, condensing out of clouds of brooding despair, falling on my upturned face like the cold rain of a mid-July morning. So, let me do it my way.

Yes. Starting is like being shot out of a cannon, full of adrenaline and the excitement of the chase. Everyone can start. And to end – ah! – to see the finish line sparkling in the distance, that alone is enough to mend broken legs, to suck energetic shouts out of tired lungs. It is the middle that has no joy, no light except the one you fumble for in the darkness to light yourself.

Yes. On some days, it is can be as simple as that, forcing yourself awake, forcing yourself to get out of bed and go in search of inspiration to do the same things – the exact same things – you did yesterday. Because, well, how can I say this? The children will need holding every day, and love will need tending, and the search for a better tomorrow will continue from where you left it last night, boring or not, routine, mundane and unremarkable or not.

So, my sister, sing Tracy Chapman if you have to, dredge the Internet for a story that will make you laugh if you have to, scream into your pillow, do the moon-walk in your bathroom, pray, or don't pray, read, or don't read, hunch over on a sofa and paint your toenails lemon green. Honestly? I don't really care. As long as you're ready when the sun comes up.

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THE GIANT WITHIN

I remember the day I ran into the house and threw my school bag down, flew up the stairs two at a time, zapped through the sitting room, down the corridor and into my father's bedroom like a cannon ball. He was sleeping. And I was panting, result sheet in hand. 'Daddy! Daddy! I came second!' He lifted his head slowly. Then put it down again. 'That person that came first, does he have two heads?'

Ah! Let me tell you something, even at the risk of sounding sexist, a man is not exactly like a woman. Yes. There are days I sit in my study and listen to my child cry. She does that sometimes, you see, when she wakes up from her siesta; sits in bed and starts crying, 'Daddy, where are you? Mummy, where are you? There is nobody here with me.' I tell you, it plucks at the heart strings, the voice of this little girl in a world that must seem infinitely vast and empty. Still, I just sit there and listen, till she gets up and comes looking for me.

I do not question it either, whatever it is that overwhelms my paternal impulse to jump up at the first cry of distress. For what is an immunization anyway? The world is full of things just waiting to kill you. And for many of them there are no cures. So, you have to bring it with you, that ability to fight back, carry it in your very genes, when you step out in the morning. It's the only way. Tell me, then, where do I take you for the vaccination against weakness, so you don't come in here tomorrow telling me you will die if he leaves you? There is a reason our parents made us eat whatever was put in front of us, left us standing there with a set of cold instructions: 'I don't care how you do it, if you have to lick the floor from top to bottom with your tongue, but this place had better be spick and span by the time I get back.' There are reasons. 

It's what I want to tell them now, when they stumble and fall, and lie there crying; when they threaten me with tantrums just because I keep saying, 'No, baby, put that toy back on the shelf'; when they yell out protests at early evening lights-out, or the standing instruction not to leave unwashed plates on the kitchen table. I want to tell them that Life is not fair. It doesn't distribute things in equal proportion amongst all the six billion of us. I want to tell them what Corpenicus discovered, that the world actually doesn't revolve around us (even if we're cute and cuddly). It doesn't care that we're too young to be orphans, or too old to start learning new things, too beautiful to be widowed, or too privileged to be impoverished. It doesn't care. But these are not the sorts of lessons you can learn off a blackboard.

You see, when we were kids on the Taekwondo circuit in Lagos, there was this one fight everyone referred to all the time. Two boys in a final. In truth, one was a young man and the other in his teens. And the teenager had hurt his arm so badly he couldn't use it much, but still said, 'I won't quit.' And those that watched said it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, the way he fought, the way he glided on his feet with his injured hand tucked away behind him, the way he won; it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. Even grown-up men stood up straight to applaud. And people said – How? You can teach a boy how to fight, yes, but how do you teach him how to fight on?

It is for this reason that we must find the heart to say to our children, 'Go back.' Yes. 'Go back and try again.' So, I did. And when I came home the next time with result sheets even better than the ones I started this story with, I showed them to my big brother. He was no longer a teenager, by now his own genes had been fully encoded with flecks of steel. So, he smiled slightly, tapped me on the forehead and said, 'Let me tell you something, Dike. You can be a giant to everyone around you. But it means nothing if you're still dwarfed by the giant you could actually be. Try harder.'  

Yes, my brother - that too is Love.

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FOR THE SAKE OF A SMILE

That moment when the feeling of someone touching you, brushing against you in passing even, makes your heart beat faster.  What do you call it? When you have to clear your throat so you don't suddenly sound like a man castrated before puberty? 'This woman!' You blurt it out, drawn like a flying insect to those lights some restaurants like to hang from the ceiling. 'This woman! Hmm! If I grab you…' Ehn? 'Grab who?' But you know she's not really angry. 'You this man…' Not with the way she's smiling and twirling curls. 'You fit?'

It's as old as the hills, you see, this dance. But, tell me, is it still as entertaining as it once was? I remember…when you had to go back to the hostel first, to take a bucket bath and wear fresh clothes, before heading out to G.H., at the gates of which you would then linger in supplication till you found someone willing to go in and call her out for you. Now? You send a message on whatsapp: 'Meet me in the Common Room'. Follow her on Twitter. Befriend her on Facebook.

Ah! Do you remember when it took three months to get a reply? Do you? When you tore out the middle sheets of your higher education notebook and bought a brand new biro, so you could explain in detail how she made you feel? Wrote the date carefully at the top right-hand corner? Counted each day that passed like the rest of your pocket-money for the term? I remember the first Valentine card I ever got. Yes. Shaped like a rectangle, colored lilac. Do you remember? How you found a quiet place to read it, away from the prying eyes of those god-forsaken amebos in your class? And your heart jumped to see the sheet of white paper inside, folded neatly and covered with her spidery writing? She replied!

Not like now. My brother, my email-box is always full. But hardly anything gets read more than once these days, not when there's an endless Universe of Internet pages out there. Back then… Ah…Back then, the sun strolled like a man with little to do, and – I swear – the moon was a lot brighter, because you could read a love letter by its light alone. And so you did; and every time was like the first time. Do you remember? And if she made the mistake of including a picture…Chai! My sister, you won't understand. Not with the way we have hundreds of your personal pictures on Instagram now. Ehn? There was a time when being handed a single Polaroid spoke volumes. So, you pinned it up on the inside of your locker and watched it like a feature length movie.

Or should we tell the stories of whispered conversations, of how some people cracked parental security locks on rotary dial telephones, then cuddled up on sofas in sitting rooms downstairs – late in the night, lights all off – with receivers pressed tight to their ears? And that was only if you were lucky enough to have one. Yes, I know; it's hard to comprehend it now, a world without smart phones to vibrate in your pocket every time he calls. Imagine. What if you had to slip out the back door, scale the low hedge, all to negotiate with your neighbor's son for time on their telephone; a 20 minute-window, in the evenings, when you could receive that call you would have spent the whole day thinking about? Love was an adventure like that, you see, before Skype, when you had to take night-bus if you really wanted a face-to-face.

Ah! My baby, I still love you like that o, even though the world is changing around us. Yes. I used to trek across town to see you. Now the effort seems too much, the one it would take to get up from this couch; so I think of sending a text instead down to you standing there alone by the kitchen sink, 'Please, bring some water when you're coming up.' No, ah, let's not go there, to that place where everywhere is too far and everything is too hard. Sometimes, love is in something as simple as this, coming downstairs. Flying a hundred miles just to find out what happened. I know, she will look up and start complaining, 'Ah, no, you didn't have to. Why did you? Don't bother, don't worry…' Don't mind her. Very soon, you will see, she will start to smile in her sleep.

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PRAY WITH ME

Just the other day, my little girl said to me, "What are you doing?" It was in the middle of a church service, so I looked around nervously and put a finger to my lips, "Shh! I'm praying." But she must have taken my 'Shh!' to mean 'ehm, let's communicate non-verbally', because she nodded and made a gesture with her palms. I knew it meant: 'Why?'

Honestly? I was not in the mood, but that question would have stayed on auto-repeat. So I whispered, "Because I have things to tell God."  

She blinked a few times and did the gesture again. I stared at her. So she did it again, and again, and again. My brother, it was not that I didn't know what she was asking this time: 'What? What are you telling God, daddy? What?' But it had been about the lost girls of Chibok, those thoughts she'd interrupted. And suddenly, watching her, I found myself thinking: 'What would I do if someone took you away from me?'

Ah! My baby, if love was a billion candles, I would light each one; line them up like breadcrumbs, so if you ever got lost you could follow them home. It is true. I have gone there, with eyes tightly shut, to the edge of the Sambisa forest, and called out their names; to the banks of Lake Chad, and called out their names; to the highest peak of the Mandara mountains, and called out their names. And when there was still no answer, I wrapped my arms round myself and whispered, 'Where are you?' But I wasn't sure any more, if I was asking them, or if I was asking God…

Yes. For that was how my over-active mind interpreted her questions. Why do you still believe? Why? Will it bring back the dead sons of Buni Yadi? It is where I am now, you see; at the place where I stand over their bed and watch them sleep, watch their little chests rise and fall, and wonder what I got myself into. Did I really think it through; that to have a child is to take a soul in your hands, to protect it so it can grow strong, to teach it so when it leaves it will know enough to navigate its way to Paradise? Tell me, if you know, is there a future for these ones?

Because I have tried, with Google and the information Voyager 1 is sending back from deep space, to answer that question. Honestly. I have tasked my mind, twisted and contorted it, stretched it as far forward as possible, but Einstein says there is a cosmic wall beyond which it is impossible to see. And so it must be, for how else can you explain this, that even after we have blamed poverty for this madness, we keep bumping into people who will never – no matter how long since their last meal – feed on the flesh of children? How? My brother, it can only be because we have not yet wrapped our minds around the entire Universe.

Yes. There are still wells in the souls of men that go so deep they tap into rivers the sources of which we cannot find, even with our deep-sea probes and supersonic spaceships. And it is from these wells that they draw, these people that come to us with an insatiable thirst for blood. But! Do not despair, for the same resilience is available in every spirit.

So, I took a deep breath and told my daughter, "I do not have an answer to every 'why?' or 'what do we do now?' But if I am sitting here talking to someone you cannot see it is only because it leaves me with an ability to tell you things Logic cannot. We will win. And even if I am not here on the day it happens, you will be, or your children, or your children's children. Do you know why? Because you will teach them what I am about to teach you; how to hope against hope. For, ultimately, the only thing that keeps people searching for something they have never seen is the belief that it actually exists. Do you understand?"

Ah! Don't worry, my brother, I am not mad. Of course, I know; a four year old cannot understand this. Not yet. That speech was made in my imagination. On that day I did something much simpler, I bent forward and whispered: "You this girl…Just pray with me."

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