The Heartbreak Story

In the spirit  of Valentine's Day, dear readers, I present to you a love story heartbreak story. It was written for the specific purpose of today. I hope you enjoy it.

There was a note. It was written on a delicately folded piece of paper and placed on the center table. The paper was a detached page from a jotter, a souvenir from a wedding you had attended with him and had agreed was the best wedding ceremony ever. ‘Our wedding is going to be exactly like that.’ He had said to you that night as you cuddled on the bed and waited for sleep. You smiled, your hands around his midsection, his around your waist; your legs entangled in his like Siamese ropes. You tried to remember what the wedding smelt like and how many storey the wedding cake was. Vanilla Ice-cream and Seven, you thought and hugged him even tighter.

You caught glimpses of the handwriting as you inched closer to the center table; your heart was thumping, your fingers would not stop shaking. It was his handwriting. It was MJK’s slanting handwriting. When he wrote, he held the pen as if he was an artist shading a drawing and carefully trying to make sure some parts remained without shade. You taunted him ceaselessly because of this.

The first two paragraphs of the note he had written on the piece of paper and had folded so delicately, so deliberately, were of things you already knew. How you had spent the last eleven months of your lives living under the same roof defying everybody including your mother, his mother and Thank God’s mother who fried yams and sweet potatoes across the street and had stopped selling to you when she found out you two were living together outside what he referred to as ‘the convenience of matrimony.’ He thanked you profusely for allowing him live under your roof. He wrote of how ‘he was sure’ you two were meant for each other from the very beginning when you had both been fortunate to sit next to each other in a taxicab. How he said his name was Majekodunmi, Majek, for short and you said you would just call him MJK. How you said your name was Elizabeth but your friends called you Liz and he said he would call you Beth because if he had a daughter named Elizabeth, he would call her Beth.

The paragraph that followed was blurrily incoherent. The only thing you were sure of was that the name of your best friend, Comfort appeared a lot. And also the words ‘I thought I could love you forever,’ and the words ‘I am sorry.’ And that name again, you were convinced that it was the name and not the feeling: Comfort.

By the time you had finished reading the note, the only logical thing you could do, you imagined, was to call Comfort. You had started sweating even though it was raining outside and had been raining all day and that day had been particularly cold; you put the fan on and sat down, you sat down for three reasons: 1. So you would not collapse if what you assumed had happened had actually happened, 2. To still yourself a little bit, at least, from shaking like a jar of Jam being transported by car along a rocky road, and 3. To stop yourself from sweating. You sweated, still. You shook, still.

Comfort picked at the third ring. ‘Liz,’ she spoke your name, and for the first time in your life, you did not know what response was suitable for when your name was called.

Fifteen seconds of confusion passed and then you managed to say, ‘Where are you, C?’

She laughed. Then there was a small argument on her side with the masculine voiced person she was with. The man collected the phone and said, ‘Beth?’

MJK, you thought. It was at that point you understood what had happened. What the note had said. Why Comfort, the name, not the feeling, was all over it.

‘Beth? I hope you understand, Beth. C is perfect for me. I hope you understand, Beth? This is not your fault. You were a good girl. I am just better suited for…’

You could not bear to hear any of the things he had to say anymore. You pressed the red button and allowed your finger to linger on it for a while longer until the phone asked if you were sure you wanted to switch your phone off. You switched off. There went your Vanilla Ice-cream and Seven. You collapsed, still.

Hanging On

When I was younger, growing up, I used to imagine that suicide was a dumb act. In my mind, any person who thought of committing suicide deserved to die and go to hell. I used to find it strange and annoying that a person would consciously decide to end his own life. My outlook began to change as I grew older and after the first quarter of 2013, when I found out firsthand what it felt like to be depressed, what it was like when a person suffers from depression, my outlook on suicide and matters that related to it changed completely.

An unfortunate fact is that a whole lot of us do not really get that suicide is hardly a function of a person’s recklessness or a person’s sinfulness or stuff like that; it actually, truly is a function of the people around them. When a person takes his/her own life, it is usually immensely likely that that person had shown a plethora of signs that that is the direction he or she was headed. It becomes the responsibility of these neighbours, these people to whom the signs have been shown to figure out what exactly is happening in the head of the person who has been harbouring these suicidal thoughts.

 A major cause of suicide is depression; a severely depressed individual is a lot more likely to attempt suicide than one who isn’t. But apart from the depressed, other people with varying reasons also commits suicide. One thing that is constant in all these causes is PAIN.

Suicide is an attempt, a desperate one to escape from pain, from suffering, not suffering as we know it, no. The unbearable kind, the kind of suffering where one isn’t just confused with life, but also tired and can no longer hold on. The interesting thing is most suicidal people will honestly rather not die, but they consider their problems substantial enough that the only plausible solution is their death.

So what can you do to help people with suicidal tendencies? Well, you can do a lot, thankfully. But first and foremost, it is important to correct the following general misconceptions about suicide and suicidal peeps.

1.      It is untrue that a person who talks about killing himself will not do it and is only just trying to get attention or trying to be noticed.

2.      It is untrue that people who commit suicide are people that do not think and are not smart enough to do anything different with their lives.

3.      It is untrue that people who are bent on killing themselves are a sinking ship and absolutely nothing can be done to help save their lives.

4.      Finally, it is most untrue that only crazy people will even think about suicide as a possible solution to their problems.

To help a person, you need to listen and monitor the person. As I wrote earlier, people who commit suicide almost always give signs or leave clues. It is up to you to decipher those clues and read those signs. Major warning signs include but are not exclusive to the following:

1.      Writing ceaselessly about death: We all write about death, difference is not all of us do it ceaselessly. When every of a person’s writing is about death, there may be a serious problem.

2.      Talking about harming one’s self. Using sentences like: Soon enough, it will be over. Or, I am not going to be with you for much longer. Stuff in that general direction.

3.      Seeking out things which could be used to harm one ’s self: guns, pills, ropes.

4.      Low mood, severe depression.

All that is needed to change a person’s mind is a good few words of encouragements from people they care about. So if you are reading this and you are thinking of suicide, please know that killing yourself will not solve anything, it will even complicate matters more when you are gone. Think of the people that truly love you and I assure you, somebody out there loves you and loves you dearly and killing yourself will simply shatter them. Do not do it.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!

N.B. – Pray for Nigeria, elections are coming and the general outlook does not look great. Pray against violence.

Of Nagging Wives and Drunken Husbands

I wrote this story about a year ago. It was published somewhere, I think greenbiro, I miss those guys. Anyway, it was slightly reworked and published again this week on Oya Mag. I think it's a pretty decent story even though as it was last year, it read like a last year, but take a look:

She sat up in the middle of the night from the mat she had been sleeping on. Her face glistened with cold sweat, her heart sprinted, and then as if suddenly overtaken by evil spirits, she sprang up and surged towards the bathroom, there, she vomited, like a nail had found its way into her throat, not worrying about waking up her children. Her face was ridden with fear as she came out of the bathroom; she quivered as she looked at the four children on the medium sized bed, packed like industrial sardines: the way they are made to fit into a tiny tin. This was the third night in a row that she had been awakened by an urge to vomit, she was sure that she was pregnant again. How would this small bed accommodate one more person? She asked herself adjusting one of the children who lay awkwardly.

Chinaza, the next door neighbour, the one that wore skimpy dresses and went out every night, the one whose face was once dark like the back of cocoyam but was now as light as a foreigner’s, had once told her that she owned a type of drink that made babies disappear from the womb of the drinker. She would meet Chinaza in the morning for that drink, she thought.

She looked at the wall clock that hung on the wall next to her husband’s police cap: 1:20A.M. it read. She thought about him. He had not shown up in three days and the last time he came, he didn’t stay the night, he left immediately after he had given her a dose of beating, after she had insulted him and asked to know where he was coming from, drunk, at that time of the night. She wished she had hauled more vitriolic abuses at him that night. The children were asleep. They had not heard her when she threatened to leave him and his children and make the best use of her beauty before her hay days wound down, when she called him a bastard and a drunk and a good for nothing woman because to her, he was a woman. They had not heard him when he said she could do whatever she liked after all she was more or less useless. They had not heard how she shouted at him as he left.

The green mat lay idly on the ground, she could no longer sleep, she was submerged by the thoughts of meeting Chinaza in the morning, by the irresponsibility and stupidity of her husband, by the poverty that was ravaging their lives, destroying them. She went towards the mirror and observed herself carefully, as if the mirror had the solutions to all her problems. She saw that she still looked pretty. She could easily do the kind of work that Chinaza was doing, maybe even better.

She looked around the one room apartment: the door of the small kitchen that was permanently ajar because it no longer had a handle, and so creaked mystically every time the weather became slightly windy; the dusty white ceiling fan that only rolled lazily when NEPA ‘brought high current’; the black water pot that was meant to be in the kitchen but was not because there was no space in the kitchen; and then their framed wedding picture, her husband looked good with his full afro hair and his black suit, the way he held her hand in his as if he would never let go, his smile, the one that lost depth and happiness as his years with her went by.

She felt angry as she focused on that framed photograph, on her husband’s smile, on herself – how happy she looked that she was getting married to the envy of all women, a man that had prospects, a man that had dreams. If someone had told her that ten years down the line, that bubbling man with all his dreams and prospects would become an inebriate that languished in retrogressive incompetence, she would have laughed at the person.

***

There he was alone at the beer parlour. Everyone else had left. His head moving back and forth as his eyes struggled to remain open. He was dozing. He wanted to sleep. He wished he could go home and sleep. He wished his wife was the same woman he’d married years ago, the one that encouraged him, the one that laughed with him and cried with him. He wished he did not lose his police job, maybe she would not have changed so drastically from the loving woman she used to be to the nagging woman she is now. It was after the police retrenched their staff and he was unlucky to be a part of the retrenched staff that she became this nagging monster. Now, all she did was scream and call him names, and look for corrosive words to haul at him, as if that would put food on the table. She was the reason he slipped into drunkenness, into redundancy. He blamed her. Other people’s wives were supportive and helped their husbands make challenges become stepping stones, but not his. His wife wanted it good all the time; he would have loved to keep it good for her, he would have loved it – but it wasn’t up to him.

He thought about his children, his four lovely children. He hated that he couldn’t provide three meals in a day for them, that he couldn’t provide their school fees. He hated that he was unemployed, he hated that he was at a beer palour instead of at his home, but he could not blame himself; his wife had made his home unlivable for him.
He got up from the seat, and headed home anyway.

His wife was still awake, sitting on a stool, hand to cheek when he arrived home. ‘Where are you coming from?’ She screamed.
He said nothing and made his way towards another mat that stood folded next to the water pot.
‘Idiot,’ she started. ‘You are not sleeping here today o. You had better go back to where you are coming from. Foolish man. Drunkard. Good for nothing.’
He did not want the children to wake up. He had lost his temper the last time he came home and had beaten her up. He did not want that to be repeated, but she was screaming so loud. He said nothing, still. He just spread the mat next to hers. He was about to lay down when her shouting got even louder.
‘Idiot. Good for nothing. Disgrace. Jobless man.’
He looked at her. One of the children on the bed readjusted as if disturbed, he would awake if the shouting did not stop, so to stop the woman from shouting, he excused himself after shaking his head in disappointment at her.

He was outside, on his way to nowhere when he saw Chinaza, the next door neighbour coming in the opposite direction, with her skimpy dress that stopped just below her waist and her full breast. They had a short conversation during which he explained to her that he had nowhere to spend the night and then she invited him over to spend the night at her place. He could have declined. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

Scare Away the Dark!

Well, today I will give every reader of this blog an advice - Go And Start Listening To Passenger. For those who do not know who Passenger is, and I am sure most won't, how do I begin to explain him? Well, okay here, read about him on Wikipedia, unfortunately that will not give you much of anything. The only way to know who he is is by listening to his music. He is one of the most brilliant artists. He makes beautiful music, flowery music with his guitars and things and you are missing way too much if you are not listening to him sing every single day of your life.



Here's an advice from him in his song Scare Away the Dark:

Well, sing, sing at the top of your voice,
Love without fear in your heart.
Feel, feel like you still have a choice
If we all light up we can scare away the dark

We wish our weekdays away
Spend our weekends in bed
Drink ourselves stupid
And work ourselves dead
And all just because that's what mom and dad said we should do

We should run through the forest
We should swim in the streams
We should laugh, we should cry,
We should love, we should dream
We should stare at the stars and not just the screens
You should hear what I'm saying and know what it means

To sing, sing at the top of your voice,
Love without fear in your heart.
Feel, feel like you still have a choice
If we all light up we can scare away the dark

Well, we wish we were happier, thinner and fitter,
We wish we weren't losers and liars and quitters
We want something more not just nasty and bitter
We want something real not just hash tags and Twitter

It's the meaning of life and it's streamed live on YouTube
But I bet Gangnam Style will still get more views
We're scared of drowning and flying and shooters
But we're all slowly dying in front of computers

So sing, sing at the top of your voice,
Oh, love without fear in your heart.
Can you feel, feel like you still have a choice
If we all light up we can scare away the dark

The Year 2015

Happy New Year, everyone. I wish you health, I wish you prosperity and I wish you happiness.

So I worked on this with a friend, Presh O'lives. First time I actually worked on a piece of writing with someone. I hope you'd enjoy it....

It's a New Year and everyone seems to be expecting the best this year. Last year was not so good for many, mostly because a lot of things did not go right. For most of the people in power however, last year must have been such a good year for them, for obvious reasons.
We hope for a better Nigeria: for example, a Nigeria with no power failure. Right now, many people can hardly boast of two days, that’s TWO DAYS of constant electricity. Also, our economy gets worsened as the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months. Our nation is suffering. We need a new NIGERIA starting from now, starting from today.

They say it's a New Year; they talk of new beginnings, new revolutions and the likes. Looking back through the years, when have we successfully boasted of a turn around? In whose leadership has Nigeria and Nigerians truly thrived. Some say things have gone from bad to worse, this may be true.
Therefore, the importance of the year 2015 cannot be overstated, especially for Nigeria and Nigerians. In 2015, the general elections will come rolling by and while some may argue that the survival of the country hinges a great deal on the outcome of these elections, I feel confident that no matter what happens, The entity called Nigeria will survive.

There’s a reason and an essence for an election and that essence is for the citizens to have their say, to determine who leads them, who should lead them. There are good reasons to feel skeptical because past elections have proved that it is difficult to have free and fair polls in these parts: We have heard cases of ballot box snatching, explosion of voter numbers, intimidation of voters and other such ridiculousness.

However, there is a new reason to feel hopeful, to believe that there may be slight differences and general improvements this time around: elections have been conducted in a few states this year and the general consensus is that if such conducts are replicated in the general elections next year, there will be no complaints from anybody.

The issue of who to vote for stirs up lots of angst and emotion among Nigerians, you only need to read comments on Facebook to see how people char each other with all kinds of vitriolic abuses because they support different candidates. APC supporters and PDP supporters go at each other like twin babies fighting for a single piece of pie. Truth is, as it stands Nigeria is divided among lines bordering ethnicity and religion but should we vote for an aspirant based on the kind of God he worships? Should we vote for an aspirant based on the part of Nigeria that aspirant was born in? Or should we have an issue based election, should we shove aside our plethora of sentimentalities and vote based on credibility? Based on track records? Based on set standards?

On a final note, it is important that we as individuals realize that we have become too big to be used by idiotic politicians. Do not allow yourself to be used as an electoral thug and dumped by the way side months after the election is over, like waste banana peels thrown outside speeding cars in an expressway. Ask yourself this simple question, will this politician that has told you to go to a polling unit and intimidate voters or steal ballot boxes or shoot at an opponent ask his child to do same? Do not be used as a weapon of violence.
Happy New Year! In 2015, I pray you get everything you wish and I hope you would be careful what you wish for

Books Of 2014

I wish for every reader of this blog a prosperous 2015, may all your wishes become realities, and may you be careful what you wish for. Amen!

So, this time last year, I briefly reviewed a few books that I had read during that year. I will do the same this year, today. I read a lot of books this year, most of them were fiction a few were not. Unlike last year, I think this year, I read more foreign books than Nigerian ones. For the purpose of this, I would review just the ones that were fiction. 

     

The Fault in Our Stars

I will say this every time I get the chance, every single time I get the chance: Until another book comes along and takes its place, The Fault in Our Stars is THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ. It was written by John Green, a man who has managed to steal my heart and become my favourite author in the space of less than 365 days – believe me; it is HARD to steal my heart, harder to do it in less than one year.

The story is about a couple of teenagers – Hazel-Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters – who both had cancer and were in love with each other. They met at a cancer support group inside ‘The Literal Heart of Jesus’ that was where they became friends, fell in love. The author built this incredible, realistic world that had this amazing ability to be both dark with the stupidity that illness is and bright with the comedy that two extra-ordinarily intelligent lovebirds were. The book, I swear, will make you laugh now and cry in two minutes – no kidding, no hype. Be prepared to laugh, to cry, to cry when you laugh and vice versa. What makes this book more amazing is that there was also a book inside it, like, most of the story was based towards another fictional story within the book titled An Imperial Affliction. Hazel was reading this book for most of the book because she loved how real it was, how true it was. Eventually she… I’m not doing this. BuyThe Fault in Our Stars and read it. You will be absolutely glad you did. Thank you, John Green, Thank you.

Americanah

Americanah was written by one of my favourite Nigerian writers, interestingly, she has also become one of my favourite Nigerian celebrities, Chimamanda Adichie. Should writers be celebrities? Not my circus, not my monkeys. Americanah is not the best Chimamanda Adichie book I have read, in fact, I have read five thousand (5,000) word stories by Adichie that could give Americanah a run for its money. Wait. In fact, I have read Adichie articles that could give Americanah a run for its money. I’m just saying it how I see it, no beef. As far as I am concerned, the book did not live up to its hype. After she wrote ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ – a fantastic book that I reviewed last year – my thoughts were that her next book would be fire. Americanah was not fire; Americanah was an extinguisher, unfortunately.

It was a story of a Nigerian girl, Ifemelu, who fell in love with a Nigerian boy, Obinze, while they were in secondary school. Then, it was the story of a girl who went to America from Nigeria. Then a story of a girl who after suffering for a while and even giving a white man a hand job one time, became this successful blogger who had on an afro and blogged about race and hair. Then it was the story of a girl who came to Nigeria after years in America and got a job with a popular magazine or something. Finally, it was a story of Obinze cheating on his wife with Ifemelu. Buy and read Americanah.

            To Kill A Mockingbird

I know. How the hell have I not read this utterly prolific book before 2014? I have not the slightest clue myself, to be honest. To Kill a Mockingbird was written by Lee Harper and till today (She’s about eighty five [85] now), she has not written any other book. I think that says everything to say about this book. I was having a discussion with a friend some time ago on Whatsapp; I told her how some books are so unprecedented that the author just has to rest his/her pen after writing them because there is nothing further to say, there’s nothing further to write. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those kinds of books.

It is the story of a man called Atticus Finch, a model of a man, a man who we all ought to want to be like. There’s nobody I would rather be in the world than Atticus. The book challenges our morals. It challenges our standards for defining right, for defining wrong. It asks questions, important, salient questions and that is the singular assignment for fiction: ask the questions that everyone else is either too busy or too freaking afraid to ask. Take a look at the titular quote and think deeply about it: ‘Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ Buy and read To Kill a Mockingbird; because Mockingbirds don’t do one thing for us but sing their hearts out.

  

           The Road

The end of the world as we know it is bound to make for a fascinating story and an even more fascinating read, that’s what Cormac McCarthy got right in his wonderful book, The Road. He is of course one of the greatest writers ever to put pen to paper. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t just write on paper, he inscribes his crazy thoughts in people’s minds, and that is something. Once, he said that death is the major issue in the world and writers who do not address death are unserious writers. Lol! Whatever.

The Road is a story set after Armageddon and the world had become the gray of used charcoal, and mostly dead. The best thing about the book is that almost 75% of it had just the two characters: the father and his son. The first three sentences read: ‘When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.’ and ‘Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.’ and ‘Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.’ His sentences were mostly short. His sentences are mostly short. The Road is a fascinating read, I swear, you would not want it to end, you would also not want to be alive when the world would end because of the way Cormac McCarthy paints this utterly colourless picture of life at the end: the only colours outside dreams are gray and blood. Buy and read The Road.

 

            

  

     The Perks of Being A Wallflower

I read this book last year but I read it again this year, four times. It’s small enough. It is one of the most personal books you would ever read. It was written by Stephen Chbosky, who, as far as I know has not written any other book after. Is it one of those books? Well, maybe. I read that he took five years to develop and publish the book creating the characters from his own memory; which is kind of interesting.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an epistolary novel about an introspective, shy, intelligent boy, he calls himself Charlie. He writes a series of letters to a boy who we do not know, who he refers to as ‘Dear Friend’. The first letter begins like this: ‘I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at the party even though you could have.’ There is this part on the first page that says: ‘I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist.’ These excerpts should tell you a lot about the book and its main character, Charlie and him being a Wallflower and it should also help you understand why I said it is one of the most personal book you would ever read. Buy and read ThePerks of Being a Wallflower.

Perhaps from next year I would increase the books I review at the end of the year to ten.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!