Calls from Behind a Door

I dream every day that your hand slips right past this letter and picks another. In the same dream, often curtained by slow-moving darkness, I dream that you find the letter, rip open the black envelope, and read each word aloud. Please, find this letter.

Please, don’t find this letter. 

You’re Nigerian and West African. You know how it is when the humidity is tongue-dangling hot, and you have to remove some clothing because there hasn’t been electricity in hours? You know how you are now half-naked, and have to deal with singing mosquitoes ready to explore, so you cover yourself with a duvet, only to fling it away when the heat holds you in a choke hold? 

I don’t know if I want you to find this letter. Will it get too hot? Will I get bitten?

Tell me you see me. Please don’t lie. Ignore my calls to stay hidden. I know at first I told you I didn’t want you to find me. That I wanted to follow the rules of the hiding game, to jump out when the others have lost. To say, “You didn’t find me, I found myself.” 

But this is different. Don’t ignore the ankara cloth poking out from the outhouse door, or the sharp intake of my breath. 

Don’t ignore the shuffling of my feet, or the shameful whisper of your name that drags itself from my lips like fire. Ignore my calls to stay hidden. Drag me out from behind this cobweb-scribbled door. I’ll pretend to be surprised when you scream in elation, when you hold your trophy close to your heart. Find me. Find my lips.

Draw me close and kiss me. You know how my body works. You know the dark spaces and the void. You know the tiny child in me that whimpers as I latch onto your hair. When you find me, hold a light to me and tell me what you see. 

But don’t tell me the world sits in my eyes. Show me. 

In finding myself, I have learned that most lost things are broken. Like me, a nipped flower bud, a dying song. A girl turned inside out, relying on the ever-withering, short life of love-me-nots to discover the rhythms of how best to dance and be free, and how best to be herself and flow like a new river. Sometimes one does this spiral dance until Providence shakes things up.

Broken things are often shy. I am shy to dance soul first, to break free like a song nestled in the throat of a child. I taste life slowly. So don’t pull me up too quickly for a dance. These are new legs. Let me wiggle my toes first, and attune myself to the rhythms of the universe. Let each river flow through my veins, and let me slowly rise to meet you.

Lost and broken people like to hide. They climb into their minds’ coffins and see if the frame is tight enough to close them in. Sometimes mine shuts me in, leaving me to claw my way out through iron thoughts. Thick, skin-tearing, and nail-breaking, these thoughts. Like demons. 

I once told you my demons’ voices rose in decibels the day I turned eighteen. But I didn’t tell you how high their voices got, nor how I had to pick up what was left of my identity in a picture, with my face trying its best to smile. 

I ate and ate that day, an endless void inside. No matter how much I eat, I won’t get fat. Don’t use it against me as they do. In West Africa, they say the correct weight isn’t slim or big-boned, but has the mounds in all the right places. I am flat, and advised to help myself to more heaps of cassava meal.

The demons didn’t say new things. They ripped off the scanty armour of my grown image and pierced me as they have since childhood. 

“How sluggish does one get?” they reminded me, taking form in old faces. “This child of yours isn’t sharp. Who does she even look like among you? Did you give birth to this child? If I rank your family by the looks, she comes last.” 

When I turned eighteen, I became that child again, the dull, sluggish, quiet child with an overbite. I took a picture without a Snapchat filter, to show them I could. They say the eyes, like a dark sky, brighten after a rain. So I rained a little when I turned eighteen. 

I joke with the idea that I am the problem. The one with Kay, the defect — the type my dad would joke has dents. Stained people like me have Kay, with a question mark placed strategically on our foreheads. My dented K-legs don’t walk me through struggles properly. 

What did you see first? Don’t lie to me. Did you see my Kay and love me anyway? Do you hear me talk about erasing all creation and finding a warm place to rest my head, and commit to hold me regardless? You laughed the first time I told you. You asked if you’d at least be there to share the sunsets with me, to which I said, “No.”

It’s a God complex: That strong desire to wipe away everything that binds you together and makes you whole just to see how you fare without them; to repent of every time you loved so hard, your soul ripped when they left or — in the case of God in the early beginnings — when they sinned to your face. 

I imagine God shaking his head while he watched them, whispering softly, “No, not on my altar. Take your sexual acts somewhere else. Not my bedroom, not my cushion.” He wiped them away, like I wish I could, but He reserved a few to begin the beginning again. 

I’d preserve you in songs and memories and dreams, and I’d spend my years repenting. I love you and always will, but I want to spend a few years or two eternities resting in the absence of what used to be, and hoping it is enough to fill the void. 

It doesn’t mean I love my solitude more than you. I just want to be a god somewhere in the beginning of time, so I can deify our memories and make an altar for them.

I toy with the idea of existing outside genders. I joke with the idea of life with no label, of being found by a place that doesn’t as much glance at me as help me to walk through my struggles. 

Hi, I’m a boy dancing on the roof of a burning house. How long till the flames wrap around my ankles and roast my bones to powder? 

I’m a girl dancing with coals held tightly to my chest in a field choked with wild flowers. Who will tell me you don’t put fire out by dancing, by inviting the winds to have a look at the burning embers in your chest?  

I’m a boy walking into the ocean. Let’s pretend it’s my baptism. Let the clamps of the ocean tighten around my legs as I advance. Let me trust the ocean enough to invite her in for a hug even when the water builds a new river in my body. 

River body, new body. 

My mom says if she were to return to life, she’d find a better name for herself: A name that tells the story of her battles and victories. I imagine a name as a container: Reach in and find the little perks and things that make ‘you’ you. It’s why the Yorùbá say that to name a child, you must first know where it comes from. 

I imagine that if I were to return, I’d show a better name for myself, too. ‘Nothing’, maybe. Òfo, the thing you see when you close your eyes. Apart from it being the feeling I’m most familiar with and the first word that drags itself up in my mouth when someone asks me what is wrong, nothing is what everything is created from.

And nothing is everything before it becomes something. The mere thought of that is powerful. Some days, I feel like Genesis, just my thoughts floating across the void that is me. 

I swallow back the urge to say to everyone who asks me how I’m feeling: “I don’t feel bad or good. I don’t feel anything.” Because they’ll prod further, will talk about how nothing is the absence of emotions, and I can’t simply not feel. But I do feel, I always want to say. I feel nothing. Call it the absence of emotions, it’s something. 

Maybe I’ll name myself Nothing in a foreign language, like Greek. I hope the letters are too mismatched to look real, so people will just think, “Oh, she probably just formed the words.” But if someone who went through the trouble of looking it up asks me, I’ll shrug. 

Call me Nothing when you find me, and watch me wield the power that the name brings. Watch me spin it into a tapestry that will enclose us and preserve us forever. Nothingness is soft and moldable, and can be easily flipped to build everything. 

I want to be flexible, like an easy, smooth note dancing out of a singer’s mouth without strain. Flexible, like the buttery ray of a young morning. 

When I was younger, I had a recurring dream: Someone handed me a thing that looked heavy, but holding it, my hands fell as weightlessness greeted me. As simple as it sounds, the thought still scares me. Maybe the dream sensed my fear of being let down. 

It’s like biting down on the African star-cherry fruit, trusting the round, orange-yellow body to be sweet, but having the meat knock your teeth in sourness. So, when you find me, don’t be weightless. Maintain the same edge that drew me to you, and the same depth. Flow like the same river that washed my body into completion. 

River, it’s the Nightingale you beckoned on to take a dip in your depth. Please, don’t flow backwards.

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