My father is hoping that I am the next thing to come through his door. I do not want to conjure images of my absence, filling spaces in him like smokes in a chimney.
In Nigeria, February 27th was the last day alive.
I love to stay alone. I also permit myself to feel human: vulnerable and invincible; to make an association and to refuse it. When the lockdown began, I felt my world would end because feeling only a part of my humanity is a vulnerability.
My father called me on a Friday, a few days before the interstate transport ban in Nigeria, his voice had a sweat. He’d hoped I would leave the office where I work and take the next bus miles, miles towards him. I didn’t.
In Kwara State, my friends started to flee. Like butterflies scurrying the rubbish pit. They fled, my neighbors. They talked about family, about home and how it holds weight. Family is significant to me too. Well, not as much as I amount substance to myself. This period should preserve me, I’d thought, spare me a time of silence. It did {does}.
Until I feel stoic.
I feel stoic as if it’s the only way to collect myself. That I let go of my family for myself and that I did not care if I implode. At this point, I may.
The last time I called my mother, her delicate voice mothered a salve. Something like rain seeped through me, draped me in a breeze of softness. I asked to speak with my father but I was unable to.
Poor man, I imagine him imagine me in his bathtub. The water steaming and exuding of detergent. I imagine him walking towards his room knowing that my smell had filled the room. I imagine him calling my name through the walls and asking if I had eaten, or if I’d slept well, called my friends or prayed. I imagine him sniff the smell of my body like air. I did not let him. I’ve deprived the father of his son.
As COVID-19 proves notorious to sunder ties with any association I could keep, it has wound into an agent to screw me. I am held at the throat each week, waiting to develop the symptoms.
As each day dawns, shutters down, I don’t know if we’ll make it out alive. Doubt has tossed me here and there like a sausage fruit.
I wake with a slight headache. I make stew from my nest-like kitchen and I sneeze. I wake with a parched tongue. I wake to have my sense of smell gone, or feel that it is gone. I have diagnosed myself over and over. The symptoms are mind tricks. Mind trick. It’s what my friend calls it. Sheer mind trick! I do not want to not believe it, I do not know what is real and what is not. I do not know what kills me or keeps me alive.