(Dedicated to Ilerioluwa Imole Oladimeji Aloba—“MOHBAD”—a sparkling 27-year-old Afro music artiste bullied to death in September, 2023, in Nigeria)
There is a tunnel in the human mind. You would think their thoughts would at least reach the bottom of that tunnel. But no. Those who stab you in the back have no deep thoughts.
God, steer my legs.
If your closest friend turns your face towards the gift of a sunset, calm down. Who knows what your own blood sibling will do to you?
Once upon a time, there was a drought. Two friends, one of them had a water reservoir. Full to the brim. Cool with promise. He had not drunk from it yet. He called his friend so they could both drink and wash their faces. But the moment he turned his back to get the cups, the invited friend snatched the water pot. And disappeared into thin air.
You give people a kilometer in your life, they grab a mile. They “turn [into] your teacher before you hammer”.
We watch Nat Geo Wild and [majority of us] flinch from the horrors unleashed by animal on animal. There is a reason they don’t have a cinema right there in the jungle: if they watched how we humans strike on humans, they would drop their cartons of popcorn and beseech God for another planet that does not contain us humans. And if you ask humans where their emotional intelligence is, where their empathy went, they have ready answers, ready justifications. They lie to their friends, to their loved ones, with the smoothness of snakes in wet grass.
People would actively sweat to see a person die, drop, deceased. Sometimes, you are the reason someone is not breathing fine. You are the joyball that spoils their day, the weight on their chest each time you win.
When we love a person, or wish them absolute goodness without trying to control them, we can only speak for ourselves, because even actions that are supposed to be louder than words are now compromised. Or what do you call your guy who smiles and hugs you with their mind aflame with poison, cursing you? Is that smile not an action? Is that hug they gave you not supposed to speak louder? Even a kiss is an action. Ask Judas and Jesus.
You cannot read an external mind. If you don’t have the powers to do it, another person’s mind towards you is a deep umbra. Yours could be filled with light, or just the same pool of darkness, but at least you are sure about that. You don’t have that luxury with other people’s thoughts.
So sharpen your own mind until your instincts are loud even in their barest whispers. Identify boundaries—yours, not to compromise for them, and theirs, not to cross those. Be charitable towards others; just ensure you take sincerity and cautiousness along with it. Let wisdom be your flex in this world of stifled flowers.
Love is strong; hate is only faster. Some good deeds get old, others don’t. Either way, whether your kindness to someone remains fresh or not, mad people forget that it is still kindness: worth of cherish. They don’t remember it when they turn on you. Memory is the seat of love and goodwill. Selective memory is desperate evil.
And to you who are evil, who coddle evil like an infamous treasure, keep it going. Silence looks like safety, feels like safety, until you realize that no human can build a fortress on betrayal. You look away now, but your mirror will come back to you. When we blow ashes in the air, they fight their way back into our faces. The hen that still roams your neighborhood, mourning, did not even knock your medicine bottle into the sand, yet you kicked at it, kicked at it, kicked at it, until you crushed all the eggs it was holding inside it. You robbed her of the joy of creation—needlessly.
The woodcarver never hears the groaning of the trees. Avarice is blacker than ebony.
Those who go too far, too deep, to scoop enough from a stream do not care if the home of the fish breaks at the swing of their pots.
An earthquake enjoys its own show of muscles, but we all know—in the process—that it shatters the painfully built house of the beaver. Leaves it interred alive. A rushed murder. A rushed burial. Without remorse.
God, don’t starve me of instincts, wisdom and timely help.
When I sit on the palm of the wicked, throw me out of there!
You who are shadowlessly good—you who think all bellies hold the same membrane. You save a friend from crashing waves. Then he turns around and shoves you into the deepest swirl of the storm.
There is too little time in this world of wars to ask your army that, “Are we all one or is there a side to choose here? On whose side are you, my friend?” The world is too jampacked to see immediately where people stand. Some people stand everywhere; they are not worse than those that stand nowhere.
“I love you”—but they are the first to rejoice at your misfortune, the first to long for that misfortune, the first to hide the source of that misfortune from you so that you can keep hæcking blindly at the wrong shït.
Ours is a world shaped like eja kíká, the rounded herring hake fish gutted with bamboo splinters and placed on a charcoal grill.
Ours is a world that is a circle, a circle that spins out its properties. Multitudes roll with it. But only few of them return at all, let alone return alive.
When you are eating from the food of life, watch out for the palm oil stains. Your white is a threat, and an open bucket of glue. Your reaction to their disrespect, the weapon they will brandish against you. Your calmness will enrage them. Your humility, which is supposed to be a strength, becomes a weakness. You will be hated just because you are loved.
They have forgotten that they don’t have to hurt you before they win.
So come with a little madness. Let your claws be ready. If you are talented and promising and succeeding, you are already too much sun in the eye. And when the opinions about how jealously you guard your space and privacy and boundaries barge in, I hope you will pay them the attention one pays mere wind.
We don’t give timely flowers here, because in this garden, we expect to return home with our friends at the end of the day and wait for the procrastination a new day affords us. We don’t consider early byebyes. Unless we are the ones forcing these farewells on those that trusted us.
God, please.
Every day is a waiting sunset. May we remind ourselves daily to try and be timely lovers, to be empathetic. Even as the heartlessness around here remains frightening. It is too dark here, people, the light is out.
Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya is a Yorùbá Nigerian writer. He grew up in Sagamu. He studied English Language and Education at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun, Nigeria. He is the author of “How to Catch a Story That Doesn’t Exist”, his debut collection of short stories about queerness in Nigeria. His other writing appears in Isele Magazine, Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, African Writer, Ngiga Review, The Muse Journal, Bending Genres, OBBLT, The Shallow Tales Review, Livina Press, Akéwì Magazine, Fiery Scribe Review and elsewhere. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the GTB Dusty Manuscript National New Novelist Prize. He is the first-place winner of the 2022 Arts Lounge Intercontinental Literary Award for Non-fiction, first-place winner of the 2022 international Itanile Story Award, and a major finalist for the 2023 Afritondo Short Story Prize. He loves to read poetry or just watch nature during his free time. He also enjoys deeply human films. He is twenty-nine years old and lives in southwest Nigeria.
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