By Ugochukwu Onyema
There is something to be said of the innocence I seek to preserve. The world is
moving and so am I, but somehow, I can’t seem to take a step forward without looking back. What shall become of my eyes?
I hold myself prisoner – a prisoner to the norm and comfort. I have succeeded in convincing this body that the world it moves in waits for its brilliance. That when it is ready to move and take space, there will still be space left to take. I have come to live in this perpetual pseudo-hopeful state of being in which life and living are delegated to the future self. That the priority of the present self – the now – is preparation and patience.
As I lay in this bed, folklores of hares and tortoises play in my head, the lessons they propagate: the virtues of patience, the threats of haste and the perils of the haste-ful. I have laid on this bed long enough to realise that there is more than a fine line between waiting and hesitation.
I’m reminded of the words of Lucile Clifton: ‘what we will become / waits in us like an ache’.
The word ‘waits’ assumes a patience of some sort – that a separate, inevitable future sits silently at a distance while we catch up to it. ‘Waits’ must be a reminder that what will become of us won’t meet us halfway, because it isn’t moved by our present plight. It has – must have – understood the necessity of stretching oneself across time. After all, it has seen these days – more than these days – and has refused to relive the same.
And an ‘ache’… is not a silent thing; it is pain, and pain is never silent. Even when cleansed or hidden and wrapped in bandage, pain will sing. And with that song, comes remembrance that we are, indeed, aware of our own suffering, of our own longing to be more than we are and have ever dreamed of being, of our own perceived inadequacies.
I have dreams and I have the potential to realise these dreams, so what I will become does not wait; it is anxious for my arrival. It is restless and eager to emerge. If only I could push and pull myself from each end of time, until I arrive at destiny – at a version of myself that I can experience with grace and pride, and look at with kinder eyes, knowing they have done the necessary work – something I am still unsure that I can truly do.
In a song I wrote towards the end of 2021, Memento Mori, I made a silent confession, a eulogy of sort: ‘all my life, I’ve waited for something / I wasn’t patient / just scared to look into the light’.
So much time has passed since I sang those lines to my candle-lit bathroom,
and somehow there is a stagnancy to the way very little has changed since. Peering through my window, I am no consenting listener to the life outside these walls as I watch it pass away. But of the both of us – life and I – I am the only one dying, fading, and passing away. It was here before I came, and it will be here after I’m gone.
Maybe that is why I am hesitant. There seems to be no significant reason to live, to write my name in the sands of time, thereby contaminating the precious innocence I so desperately want to protect. I want to say that it all seems so fickle, pretentious and, in a way repetitive. But I am almost certain that I am simply just afraid and clinging to the comfort these words bring.
Each step I take is staggered, no stifled or maybe restricted. Always second-guessing. There must be more to this, more to know, more than meets the eye. I have become an unmoving thing. Though I do not move, I am not resting. I am restless under the surface. This paralysis, it snuck up on me, like a thief in the night; sly and sneaky. It crept its way silently into me, twisting and turning, feeding and growing. Until it enveloped me completely and swallowed its own tail. Such that when I examine it, trying to find a way out, I arrive at wherever I began. I can’t trace the beginning from the end. I can’t even be sure how or when this began. Its character eludes me.
Was it, in fact, slow and silent, stalking me meticulously like a predator? Was I rightly oblivious to its eyes on me? Did it pounce on me instinctively on first sight, dropping its heft on me, devouring my will to live and declaring that there was no escape? Or did I simply ignore what was unfolding right before my eyes? My eyes. What shall become of my eyes? There is music buried beneath my brown and bone. There are songs in my gut, not sown but covered in dirt – verses unwritten and unsung. The choruses, they grow fainter and fainter until I can no longer recall the melody.
A tongue cannot bear the weight of another’s words. So, who will sing my songs (if not me)? They hold proof of my experience, evidence of my existence. Without them, I am formless and without definition – a lost wanderer, tracing the stars in search of Messiah. These days, I try to resuscitate them, but when I sing, the songs get stuck in my throat, and I cough up water. The songs now wet, slippery lumps of promised potential, too heavy for my tired lungs to lift.
I believe I am hallowed ground – fertile soil – but curtains cannot deny the life outside these walls any more than I can deny the songs on my head, which once bloomed and bore fruit, now bristling into wildflowers. I feel them all – the flowers, the world, my songs.
They fade in the wind, drifting farther and farther away from reality, away from reach, away from memory, away from me. A body at rest will remain so unless acted upon by an external force. As I lay in this bed, I am not sure if – or why – I am searching or waiting for a messiah – anyone in fact – to tell me to move, to get up and walk, to bring me back to shore because I have drifted for far too long, to clear the path and make it known because I do not know the way, because on my own I am a river unending, forever meandering, flowing in every direction. Never starting or reaching an end. Never merging with the fuller self that awaits my arrival.
A state of restless abandon, restless roaming to which I am confined. But this cannot be it. This cannot be all there is to me. This cannot be all I become. Something must give.
I cannot shake the feeling that, in my captivity, I am both the captive and the captor. That to break this spell of unmoving, this cycle of restless roaming, I must break the world and its laws. Exert a force from within. Push from what has been and pull from what is yet to come. Create energy from nothing if I must. Break myself to dust with my bare hands and remould it in my own image, again and again and again, until I resemble myself – as I was, will be, and most of all, as I am.
Maybe I can start here. Maybe this is how I arrive at reconciliation at last: stretching myself across time, one page at a time. This realisation is not new. I have been here before. It is a tired, old truth, a mercy I bestow upon myself: that one day, I will move.
But this is not mercy; it is deception. A trick I play on myself so I am assured of the ground still hard beneath my feet and the stubborn dreams still alive and roaming inside me, like an ember that will not die.
They are restless to become, but at least they are alive. Through it all and nothing at all, they remain – pure and without blemish, unscathed by the world and its judgment. This is the innocence I seek to preserve. The mercy I bestow upon my head.
