29

A

Journal Entry (13th August, 2022)

It is 10:00AM in Minneapolis. I am in M’s living room listening to Cesaria Evora and I could have sworn that I am in a dream, and I have been trying to wake up but it’s still real and I am still here and it’s so beautiful and cold and quiet.

B

I have been thinking about all the ways movement changes us; humans as beings of movement, morphing, shape-shifting in order to thrive, to survive. In my memory, all the lives I have lived are intertwined with the places I have lived.

In Ikare, I was a bright-eyed boy, learning the stories and theories of Archimedes, Newton, Pascal, Charles and other dead scientists. Curious about the many ways of the world and looking forward to important markers that I thought would punctuate my life­ — a first girlfriend, a first kiss, a first taste of alcohol. Yet, carrying the burden of my fears for the future alone, intimately. Would I get the desired UTME score? Would I get enter into Medical School? Would I disappoint my uncle?

In Ife, I was a lost boy (who was learning to be a man), fragments of my hopeless soul held together by religion, my mother’s prayers and dreams. It was also in Ife that I learned glossolalia and the many ways of calling god through the void.

I became a man in Ibadan and got lost again. I sought for my salvation in many places (dark, warm, wet, soft, hard, bright, full, empty) but it was writing that saved me and I became the cartographer of memory.

C

About a month and half ago, I bade farewell to all the places and people who have made me and arrived in this strange country but this time, I wasn’t lost.

You see, in ’21, I tried to defeat inertia and dared to dream again. It was a tall dream but I did dream it and there were people who held my hands and believed this dream (even more than I did) and because of them, I am here, present.

D

Journal Entry (19th August, 2022)

…I am currently waging an inside war against detachment. I can feel this strange country already stealing my tongue (the way it speaks, the food it eats). I want the city to accept me, I want to feel its pulse, I want to learn its secrets but I want to do it without letting go of myself, fully to it. Isn’t this resistance to detachment futile? Why resist when the body and mind may yet succumb to the magic the city wields?…

E

Today, I am 29 years old in a country ten thousand kilometres away from the familiar — my lover’s touch, my father’s laughter, my mother’s scent.

And I am reminded of the parable of the sower and the permutations of movement — …As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

Here is to planting a firm foot in this strange land,

Here is to watering, to germinating, to growing,

Here is to bearing fruits and morphing into a forest,

Here is to 29.

-OluAfolabi