Notes on 32
1.
For some weeks now, I have been circling and thinking of all the ways I could begin writing this essay. Yet, when it eventually came to putting pen on paper [my feeble attempt at encapsulating the last year of my life falls flat and suddenly appears even more daunting than I had envisaged]. It’s the most difficult year in my own living memory. All the guardrails I have assembled for most of my life [brick by brick] to shield me from the absolute brunt of despair and forlorn have all unraveled and I have been laid bare, my wounds are raw, untended, unhealing. Nothing works, nothing holds; not pessimism, not hope, not will, not joy. But love continues to hold me, wraps her gentle hands round my despairing soul, guide my hands through my nadir, but I continue to sink.
2.
Conversations between doctoral students [especially Nigerians] are very predictable: we run into each other, catch up, conversation inevitably morphs into complaints about here and about home [both the physical and the political], we laugh, hug and move on into our day.
Recently, I ran into H. I tease him about his holidaying antics over the summer, he asks how I am doing and how it feels to be getting closer to the end of the race, I tell him it’s hard, I tell him everyday when I wake up, that the price feels heavier than the day before. He probably did not understand, we laugh, hug and move on into our day.
3.
Journal entry:
There is so much tiredness trapped inside my body. I want to let it out but I can’t. I can feel it, I can smell it but I cannot touch it, I cannot pull it out.
I continue to call it “tiredness” because I am afraid to call it by its true name.
4.
I am sorry this essay has been more grey than I would have liked, but it isn’t all doom and gloom. I remain immensely grateful for the pockets of joy I continue to find. Grateful for spring and the blooming of flowers after the endless monochrome of winter, grateful for my wife and the love that continues to hold me, grateful for friends that understand a little and continue to forgive my disappearances, grateful for the prayers of my mother, grateful for the breath I continue to hold, grateful for the end of another journey around the sun, grateful for 32.
5.
I hope the next year is kinder.
-Boluwatife OLU Afolabi
