Friendship as fast fashion — and other paragraphs
Friendship as fast fashion
It is the age of Tinder. The toughest time to make a friend, but also the easiest. You go shopping for one the same way you buy groceries from a store down the street or pick a palmful of pebbles from the beach. And you discard them just the same when you’re done and bored again. You pile them up like clothes from Shein or Temu. Those cheap things, none of them quite fits. Occasionally, you find one that looks like it was made for you. It feels right. The texture is great. It doesn’t hide too much of you from the world, nor does it over-expose. To top it off, it is your favourite colour: butterscotch yellow. You look good on each other. But after you wear it a few times, the daunting déjà vu catches up. It is a script you cannot escape. The fine dress starts to fade. It rips apart in the armpit area. Why bother fixing what can be replaced? So you throw it away. Or worse, you forget it in the ungoverned wastelands of your wardrobe. You start to swipe again for a new shiny companion. You are a collector of fairly used friendships. Friends, if you can even call them that.
With God’s eyes
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could borrow God’s pair of eyes for a day? Or however many he has. Just for once in our lifetime, let there be no limit to our vision. Within a minute, we would finally have answers to questions that have haunted philosophers for centuries. Like, is there a rock somewhere in this universe so big that God cannot lift it? I’m kidding. But we would certainly be able to tell if there is life after death. We would be able to see what heaven is like, same as hell. We would put all the prophecies and conspiracy theories to the test. Aren’t you dying to know if there is an Illuminati pulling the strings behind all the world’s disasters, pandemics and elections? Don’t you want to know what Elon Musk’s true form is? Or what Tinubu’s real age is. You might get cheeky and even take a peak into the future. Do we solve climate change? Do the aliens finally find us, or have they been here all along? With God’s eyes, you could visit all the seven wonders of the world and the countless other places you’ve wondered about. The best part is you could appreciate them from uncommon angles. The peak of the pyramids. The bottom of the ocean. The other side of the aurora or an eclipse. The belly of a volcano. With God’s eyes, you could climb Everest without losing a breath. Tour an ant colony without losing your head. You could say hello to the white blood cells keeping you alive and reach the ends of the expanding universe within only a blink. But God’s eyes offer even more. They allow you to spy on your friends in the moments they share with no one else. You see your mother when she returns from the market and counts the day’s earnings over and over, wondering if it would be enough to keep you and your brothers in school the next day. Or bear witness to her sleepless nights years into retirement, when she’s awake, wondering if it’s too early to text. You see as she writes and deletes messages, asking how you’re doing and reminding you of her love. With God’s eyes, you see your subordinates at work and the struggles they face behind their desks. How they hesitate before they submit a report or come to you. With God’s eyes, you pull all the curtains you can in all the places you shouldn’t be. You see the vulnerability of your friends and the humanity of your enemies. You find your most pious friends cussing their maker and your most unbelieving friends bending their knees to the unseen. You find the most shy person in your circle dancing to amapiano and admiring themselves in a mirror. You remember your secondary school bully and find that he has three kids now. Also, his wife beats him and he’s afraid of the dark. You realise you’ve only seen people with masks all their life. They replace one with the other, only revealing their true self when they think no one is watching. God alone bears this burden. And what a burden it is. When they’re alone, you catch a glint of sadness in the eyes of the sex worker and a glint of regret in those of the armed robber. You realise a cctv room linked to every living soul might as well be filled with eight billion mirrors, instead of monitors. People are saddest when they’re alone. And because we’re all condemned to be alone, we’re all condemned to be sad. You borrow God’s eyes, expecting them to make you more divine. Instead, they make you more human.
The loneliness of an unexploded ordnance
First, it was purely bad luck. Hundreds of soldiers came and went, but none of them stepped into his orbit. Maybe he just wasn’t attractive enough. Or maybe he was too attractive. One by one, he saw all his kinsmen burst into ecstasy at the slight touch of a man. He can only imagine what it feels like. When he opened his eyes, he was already on this forsaken field. Alone. By himself. As the war progressed and the fighters ran out of ammo, he perched wholly still on the field, his chances growing slimmer and slimmer. First, it was just bad luck. But now he knows for sure he was cursed. Because one day, years after the war, when the battleground was now a playground trampled not by the feet of weary men but by those of excited children, someone finally gazed upon the land mine and approached it. Still, when this stranger picked him up, and he shut his eyes to savour the unravelling, nothing happened. There was no bang, nor was there applause from the skies. No flaming fireworks. No blinding lights. No orgasm. Only silence and a curious pair of eyes, growing bigger and bigger. First, it was just bad luck. But now he knows he is deficient. He is not like the others with a deliciously short lifespan. He was not born for a grand exit. He is condemned to a lonely life of bearing witness. He would spend the rest of eternity in a museum as a failed relic of a war that helped no one. He would spend the rest of his days trying to itch himself. Maybe if he hit the right spot, he could invite Armageddon upon these bloody tourists.
Freedom after speech
You want to speak, but then you remember. There is freedom of speech, but the freedom afterwards is not guaranteed. Because after words, there is usually a full stop. Because in life, full stops are a metaphor for death. Because the dictator offers you only three options. One, to end your suffering quickly with a full stop. You can no longer anguish over small things like corruption and genocides when you no longer have eyes to observe or a brain to think or a mouth to speak or feet to stand upon. How can you be tormented over a life you could have when even life you do not have? Two, the dictator offers you something worse than a full stop. He pummels your consciousness into a com(m)a. So you are stuck between life and death, between hope and anguish, between speech and silence, between holding on and letting go. Worse, he introduces a semi-colon just as a reminder that he is a demi-god, less than the almighty but second to none. You want to speak, but then you remember you are in the presence of one who has mastered the semantics of torture, one who has made a deal with the devil, such that with every breath he takes, an innocent life is taken. So, instead, you speak with your legs. You remember that to avoid the full stop, your poem must be filled with run-on lines. So that’s what you do. You run. You run. You run. You run, and you hope that even though the dictator has cheated everyone in his path, he has not mastered how to cheat death. You hope that one day, the full stop of justice will appear, the dictator will disappear, and maybe a new chapter will be written.
