The Thing About Memories

People hold on to moments for different reasons. It’s always held my fascination—this ability to trap treasured pockets of time and hold them up on walls, night stands, and tables or in foxholes in your mind where they’re more palpable and less visible. If I trouble my mind hard enough, reach into the fringes where there’s not much beyond dust, spilled grease, and scattered jigsaws, I could latch on to something. But the best moments aren’t taken out of backwater enclosures like a moth-eaten wrapper from an old, rusty metal box with hinges that creak sorrow. I have found that when we revisit our best moments, we approach often with a wonder that we lived them at all; scenes we will never get back, but didn’t know that at the time until we were fully out at the other end.

Now, I have July in a comfy bubble in my head, hanging just within reach. Teasing, like Christmas lights. Sometimes, when I feel stretched and hung out to dry by adult life, I go in, and live it all over again. It’s a vinyl record I put on a phonograph, and it starts like this.

July in a foreign land.

It will never be like any July.

Not only for what chalk and cheese-tongued natives say or how welcoming they’ve been to me as a corps member. Certainly not just for the looks of the host community; it’s rocky plains spotted with clumps of thorny grass, isolations of crusty trees, mountain heaps that survey fiefs of lacklustre houses, glazed over by the tranquility and nuanced drabness of a largely uneventful, farming population. And rains that never come except by prayer and fasting.

This July, my chest becomes a bone-cloak for an empty cistern, hard to the touch, but a sheet of wax really. A deep, unremitting gnawing haunts its walls. The echoes test my mind like the sonar systems of those trouble-looking American subs in the movies searching for explosives as they meander the seabeds within Russian territory.

I’m a man, I remind myself. A man doesn’t fall for tests. He makes a cell of himself and locks his demons until he stares into their faces and sees himself.

Someone knocks at the door. I pry myself away from the PES 2017 on my laptop and push towards the door. The groan of the faulty ceiling fan drowns out everything characteristically. It’s a bit hot inside still, and outside is even hotter. I squint for a few seconds to fend off an offensive blast of sunlight. Where I’m from, the sun is known to be a bit more laid back, less given to tantrums.

My visitor is family. Austin. He used to be fair before—think the bright yellow inside of a ripe pawpaw—now the dark red of palm oil.

“Nna m, I don dey go o,” he says.

“Ah. Oya na. Safe journey, my G.”

I step outside. Shake his hand. A whole year together in Shongom, Gombe state, and it all boils down to this one moment. The handshake is brief; it isn’t even firm. It’s as if we don’t want to acknowledge the music our words strike, as if pretending not to see the raw finality of it will banish the rain clouds gathering for us and its aeolian songs. We were scared. I can say it now. It was a volatile moment and we were scared it would leave us fighting to put ice-cold pieces back together. Frozen shards never get back together unless they melt, and we were men.

Men turned brothers.

Brothers forged in the impudent feu de joie of NYSC.

We don’t melt.

Instead, we’d become a brotherhood forced to acquiesce to time’s impudent sentencing and dance to the cruel tune that is “The End of All Things”.

He says something about leaving for the state capital to meet up with the banks before closing hours. I say something that masquerades as agreement. I hang back as he walks away. Then, move over to the ‘family house’, a two-room apartment abutting the fence at one end of the compound, where all four of us friends spent most of our time. We used to be five. Gloria. A petite-statured, mesmerizingly curvy beauty. But she left a few months earlier. That was the first time I felt something like this.

Rather than open the iron red door into the apartment, I stroll to the single-door entrance to the compound, linger right at the threshold and look—

Austin is by the roadside trying to flag down an okada.

The sun lies naked on my skin. It’s an orange evening. The air has some of the sun in it. Under a tree across the road from Austin, a group of indigenes sit around bowls of groundnut, cracking the shells, separating the seeds, chewing some. The hand pump a few paces away from them groans as a child works its lever to fill his bucket with water. But why does it all feel so bland, grayscale, like the latter days of a zombie apocalypse? I turn away, back to the iron red door. Glory is still around. And so is Nenye. There’s one less of us now, yet it doesn’t mean the world has ended; this cocoon we’ve elaborately crafted—sometimes painstakingly—around us this one year and have come to breathe and exist in. It is the only world that matters.

As I step through the door, that meticulously knitted cocoon becomes a flimsy bubble fighting to hold its own. I feel like a sausage of excreta plungered into a crammed chamber. Does this comparison even work? I sha felt shitty. The atmosphere is drab, hollow, and at the same time heavy, like a damp blanket. There are two people inside, and their silence rings with a seasoned sharpness.

Nenye is in the main room, a small curl on the carpet, short brown-tailed dreads, full lips—the fullest of all of us—completely fixated on her phone screen. An ache rips from the depths of my inside, rippling across the emptiness. But it isn’t for her.

See, I wasn’t supposed to travel yet. But not everything is easy at the end. In fact, some decisions take up wings and become impossible to catch. Every corps member, and I mean this in the strictest sense of the word (strictest taken to mean connection-less, non-rich, and wooden-spooned), gets into the scheme eager to leave, only to squirm for more time when the finish line is near. You just can’t keep the voices out of your head, the most prevalent of which is: what next? Where next?

And I didn’t have the answer; even though the scheme tries to trick you into an answer by organising seminars and workshops at the close of your service year. It’s helpful. But in reality it is just Messi beating Lewandoski and Haaland to the Ballon d’Or. Talk about smoke and mirrors.

Moving over to the second room, it’s profoundly sombre. Heavier. Dimly lit. All two windows are shut—one of Glory’s annoying, but remotely understandable perks. She occupies one of two beds towards the right corner of the room, a tentpole of a girl folded into a foetus with her back to the entrance.

“How far?” I ask.

“Austin has gone.” Her voice cracks.

It gets darker.

The sky itself may just have dropped.

I’m very aware of the thumping in my chest.

Even a vengeful ghost would’ve been caught up in such stinging ennui.

Glory is such a crybaby!

I stutter my way through an encouragement or agreement; can’t remember which. Facing a restless onslaught of emotions, back against the wall, it’s difficult to get anything from my mind to feed my tongue. The whole world appears to rest on my shoulders, but I’m no Atlas, so it crushes me slowly, leaving me as a dry berry in the grip of a plier.

I can’t remember being in a place so quiet and cold.

Unable to stand any longer, I lie on the bed beside her, mum, completely tight-wrapped in a gauze of disbelief and stubborn dread.

Glory had told me she’d be leaving on Tuesday, which is the following day. One of us just left and it feels like someone has ripped my arm off. Now, I want to do anything but believe she’ll be gone the very next day. That first thing the following morning, I’ll help her find okadas that’ll take her and her things to the park at the neighbouring LGA, and she’ll be gone, poof like one of the memories in Dumbledore’s pensieve.

“Glo,” I call, hesitant.

Silence.

“Are you still leaving tomorrow?”

Still no answer.

The larvae of dread inside me spawns, sending tiny bugs of cold across my skin.

“Glo—”

“I don’t know.” Her voice wobbles.

“How can you not know? You told me you wanted to go on Tuesday? Or are you leaving on Wednesday?”

“No. I have to leave here before the protest. It’s not a good idea for it to meet me on the road.”

“So, Tuesday then.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Then, it comes. The first sounds of rain: Glory sniffles and eases into a petulant sob in the way only a lastborn can.

Pain can be tangible, searing and incisive like a blade. Sometimes, it can be like a hammer, dull and heavy, but massive in its destructive scope. And that was what we felt. The dangerous thing about this type of pain is that it can appear impotent, masking itself under other feelings, only to strike with the devastation of the Mongol army, overwhelming and ruthless.

It was only then, hearing the throaty whimpering through her tears that I broke, crumpling like wafers. That feeling violated the paradigm of language. It was invasive and riveting, like being pinned under a sound wave, except this was coming from inside out. I couldn’t believe the sounds coming from my throat. But I couldn’t help myself. This was my family. I’d grown with them, laughed with them, fought with them, and now the universe was trying to tell us our time was up. Surely, it made sense that I’d do the one thing I hadn’t done with them yet. Doesn’t make me less of a man, does it?

And to think that we never knew each other before NYSC.

The door groans on its ragged hinges, and Nenye walks in. She kneels between us both, drops a hand on each of us, and begins to drop consoling words.

See, Nenye is a strong girl, oscillating between the admirable determination of Peter Obi and the often painful grit of Nyesom Wike. This metaphor is even more significant, considering she was going to be the only one left behind. She still had a few months on her tab, and would have to combat the aching loneliness alone. Yet, there she was, consoling us.

It dawns on me then. I have to leave with Glory. I’m not Peter or Nyesom, and definitely not Nenye. My mind leaps into the future and the raw absence of these two—Austin and Glory who I began the journey with—are demons I know I can’t defeat. They’ll tear me apart and beat me until there’s nothing of my manhood left but batter.

Time becomes plural. A litter of fragments. Morsels that have to be swallowed deliberately.

Glory, Nenye, and I manage all the time we have left, pushing back the urge to fight a losing battle against seconds that tick swiftly by. Glory and I manage the seconds even more on the bus back home. In the end, it doesn’t matter that we sit right next to each other, that we try to savour each other’s presence while simultaneously playing off the awareness we’re losing this battle, or that we hold hands in the moments before I get off at my bus stop.

When I get down at Okigwe and the bus zooms off with the last bit of my Youth Service year in it, I realise something. Moments spent with loved ones are counted and assessed in seconds. Yes, those one-byte pockets of temporal existence where everything is real and experiential right before it becomes history; that’s what you should cherish, that’s what you should hold on to, that’s what you should make the best of. Not what is ahead or behind. Because at the end, it is the culmination of those seconds that make for a warm hearth of memories not just in your head, but in your heart.

And that became July.

Every July, I will remember that sticks and stones may break my bones, but love among friends can break it all.

Did I enjoy it? Heck, yeah. We’ve built a network for life. Do I mourn it? Also, yes.

But it’ll get easier.

With time.

At the end of the day, this is what we are; hunters, not for anything, but for pockets of time we can breathe our name onto and take to the grave.