On this day four years ago, I published a piece wondering what life would be like in my forties. Four years later, and I can say my colour vision remains largely the same although it has been subtly altered by professional false starts, becoming an atheist, poverty, heartbreak, deciding post-heartbreak to never fall in love again, and conveying this information to some less-than-welcoming friends and women. However, no pothole was so deep—no incident so traumatizing—that it has entirely robbed me of colour. Until three years ago, when my best friend took his life.
Recently, I have had people check in to see if I was still coping with the loss of my friend and I wonder what they want to hear. Truth is, I have practically forgotten the language of grief. Some people found it distasteful or confusing when I told them that I was “fine“. And in a bit to get me to talk, they’d ask, “you know Damilare, what’s up with your blog? It’s been a while.” I wouldn’t know what to say either, so I’d just say I was taking a break from the damn thing. I mean why shouldn’t I? It is not like things were rosy for me; I was going through the worst period of my life, broke, in my parents’ house and there were voices constantly whispering to me that I mustn’t forget the dead, and others telling me that I shouldn’t let myself think about them too much.
“You’ll get used to it,” some would say, but I never did. It got personal and went the other way: I fell into patterns of morbid sensitivity and entered a state of perpetual mourning. You see, a child dies of a disease, by a bullet, in a war, or even gets clobbered by a drunk driver and you can somehow ascribe that to bad luck. But taking your life? Man, that’s just fucked up. So, it was never like I didn’t really want to write, it is just that writing about an issue forces you to think about the issue so before you talk about pain, you first had to locate it. You’d expect something like that to just happen, but it doesn’t, not until events make things obvious.
You are in a deep sleep, dreaming, and someone walks in; someone you loved, a father, a mother, a friend – and you are happy to see that person alive and well, happy to have a conversation, to say the things that you never got a chance to say, then you wake up and the person you loved is still dead, and you have to mourn all over again. You try to talk to a friend about it and then stop talking about it to them, knowing after the first few times that the story is just repetitive, and there is really nothing they could say to pacify you anymore other than, “you’ll be fine”. But that didn’t stop you from thinking about it a lot, doing a lot of hideous projection from it, forming a system of depressing metaphysics around it. You wondered whether, in time, it would all slip away and become like everything else distant, but you doubted it, and for good reason. And then your emotions would turn very ugly, and negative cycles play out in a loop, until you finally realize that nothing ever comes close to the death of a deeply loved one.
Two years ago, while working on my last piece on this blog, I woke up one night and knew I had to stop writing. The thought had crossed my mind several times, but after waking up that night and not giving a shit if I was dead or alive, I knew it was time to wrap it up.
I don’t want to make anything out of this and I certainly don’t want sympathy; writing was my idea to begin with, I could have stopped anytime, and as things go, I managed to make abosolutely nothing from owning this blog. I was starting to focus on my career as an engineer, and it was clear writing still evoked feelings of sadness I had seen before and hoped never to see again. With that out of the way, it’s been a groove talking about my life, hanging out with you, getting close to pain, touching it, losing myself in it and trying myself against it. I had always wanted that, never mind why, it had just been a thing of mine, the way this blog was always a thing of mine, and I’d done it; I was in many ways friend to many strangers who gave just enough fucks to read my thoughts, I knew what people who pursued writing knew now, I’d done it and it meant something. Through this blog, there was always someone who would tell me that I took the words out of them and always, they would ask me with an emotion whose intensity would shock you to please continue telling it, because they really did have the feeling that my story was being told for them, that they were going through so much shit and that somehow no one back in the World knew about it.
Today, I am better. Or like some would say, happy. It feels so good to not remember the feeling of sadness but even better, to not be broke. Am I now one of the richest men in the world? Ah don’t get me wrong, nothing has changed, it is just easier to say you are no longer broke when you don’t have to think about where your next meal is coming from. Am I deserving of my newfound happiness? My friend sib makes it a daily activity to remind me there is no one more deserving of happiness in the world than me. She was there through it all, the sleepless nights, the depressive days, and the hours when I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Was there a need for all the pain? I don’t know, man. Maybe it is karma for something I did in this life or a past one, maybe everyone actually reaps what they sow. Maybe Pharoah got what he deserved for all he did to the Israelites, but what about Omar the farmer who woke up with frogs on his face, his cattle dead from anthrax. his wife, face fucked up by lesions, his only child dead all because of a leader he didn’t even get to vote for.
What about the people who reap what they don’t sow? Babies born addicted to crack, the 4 years old molested by a neighbour, victims of ethnic cleansing.
Is there a law in the universe or something? A law about needless suffering? A law even God himself cannot break?
Occasionally, I remember something I did as a child, or something life did to me, some injury, rejection, some humiliation, death, and it feels like everything is interconnected and every action leads to another. Maybe if I hadn’t travelled to my best-friend’s place, we wouldn’t have been kidnapped by the police in his room; a sequence of events that ultimately led to him taking his life. Or maybe if he was alive, I wouldn’t have turned out to be the engineer I am today, the kind that is too busy to write on some stupid blog.
Is there some moral lesson here? Man, I can’t say for sure, except that most of us tumble into our lives. We become who we are by accident. We try awfully hard not to look backwards, afraid to find out that maybe we should have done something different. But circumstances have forced me to question every element of my life. And do you know what I discovered? It seems like for everything that happened to me, something worse happened to another person a century or two ago. So, if the question of “why me?” couldn’t even be pondered upon any more than “why not?”, is there even a question to be answered?
If there is a lesson here, it is that you can’t build your life around a perception of what happened. You can’t get stuck in the past thinking about what could have been. You have to let things go. You have to start afresh. It is just that sometimes, you think you are going to start your life over and do it right, but you just never get past the beginning again.
Back in the World now, and a lot of us ain’t making it. The story got old, or we got old, a great deal more than the story that had taken us there anyway. Or so it seemed when, after a year or two or four, we realized that we were simply tired. We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Because we knew that if we stayed too long, we would become one of those poor bastards we thought we’d never be: one of those souls you see whose weariness have gone far beyond physical exhaustion, into that state where no amount of sleep will ever give them the kind of rest they need; every torpid movement they make tells you that they are bone-tired, that they’ll stay tired until their time is up; their eyes are dim with it, their faces almost puffy, and when they smile you have to accept it as the best they’ll ever have to offer. We saw them, so we got out and became like everyone else who has been through life: changed, enlarged and incomplete.
Happy birthday to me.
