28

A

“I have not been writing because I have been afraid” -Journal Entry (16/5/2021)

In May, after battling the inertia for so many months, I made a first entry into my journal (a fuchsia coloured notebook interspersed with white circles). While I have been able to document titbits of my life and thoughts on Twitter, it was simply impossible for me to put pen to paper and record my life in the tender, intimate way I have always done. The aetiology of my lassitude was not oblivious to me. It was a simple story— I desired the realization of a goal, I committed every resource I had to it and I waited for the final attainment. Waited and waited, but it did not come and it broke me.

B

“I have to be honest and tell you that sometimes, it still feels hard, and that some mornings and nights are so difficult that all I’d want to do is curl myself into a ball, curse the darkness and will myself to disappear, I’d call forth my own non-existence till my throat goes sore. But the darkness is not a being of permanence...” -Excerpt from a mail to a friend (23/4/2021)

I have always had an intense relationship with words. For every phase of my short existence, there were words that’d beckon to me and I’d find myself returning to them. Words that’d engulf me with kindness, words that meant more to me than they were intended to mean. When I experienced a great storm in the middle of 2019, I found solace in two verses of the Quran (94: 5-6) — For indeed, with hardship [will be] ease. Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease.

When the great storm passed (like all storms eventually do) and I began to seek a new purpose, I found myself returning to the wordings of a book I did not finish reading. And I must admit that for me, the title of the book came to mean so much more to me than the plot of the book—Sefi Attah: Everything Good Will Come.

Everything good will come.

But everything good did not come no matter the number of times I muttered those words under my breath, no matter how strongly I willed them to be, to form, to exist. No matter how desperately I said yes to my chi. I think I was quite afraid to even imagine that I could have lost. That I said yes and desperately wanted my chi to also say yes, but all I got was silence. Heavy silence.

C

“I do not know the man I am without the light” -Journal Entry (31/5/2021)

I spent the rest of 27 gathering light by myself into myself. About a month ago, I had an epiphany that came bearing a new gift and with it came new words—it is simply a matter of acceleration now.

Here is to 28 and the rising of a new sun.

Here is to defeating inertia.

Here is to boundlessness.

-OluAfolabi.