Don’t Call Me a Pervert
Some things are better left unsaid. Like a person who is in the church after finishing a ‘hot exercise’, our life moves from one world to an entirely different world. Life is really complicated. You are in a room of people who have separate worlds from you. We have just overcome one challenge. Look! We are already faced with another one. We battle with ourselves, some of which we continuously lose to. We are often misunderstood. No! We are at fault too. We try again. ‘We are served breakfast’ each time we want to try again. Swollen eyes that even our own dear tears got tired of us. We run to people we call our own but we will not find them. We knock on their doors till our knuckles wear out. We soon realize that we are on our own.
Not minding the noise, I said to myself, ‘we will not all make it’. It then dawned on me that I had been staring at a European lady. By her side was a little boy, whose age I had guessed might be around 7 because of his missing incisors, waving at me with his contagious smile that I could not resist. Only for me to find myself smiling and waving back at him. The first thing I said to myself was that racism is clearly unnatural. His hand-waving was clearly a stopover for me. I continued. Why can’t boys date boys too? We won’t all find love if we keep doing it with our old, covered with dust, traditional compass. Rice became sweeter for me when I started using fork.
I have received purely nice unsolicited treatments from whites. The one I can remember very well was when a Chinese taxi driver picked me up when I missed my way, even while I was sounding clueless. He did not understand English but I could tell he wanted to know the name of my home country. I am from Nigeria. I have been asked the same question by a man from Georgia, but this time, he went further to ask about the country, since he was looking for which part of Africa to visit. Nigeria is a bad county to visit. The government is doing nothing. Don’t try it. But I could not mumble these words. It was difficult for me like a sleep-paralyzed person who is finding it difficult to move his limbs just after waking up. There is a lot of beautiful places to visit in Nigeria. And even the most evil person wants to make a good impact in Nigerian politics.
I have been in a situation where I felt helpless. No one could render me any help because the people that could help were not available and the people that were available could not provide any. After I got the drink ‘the stupid drink’, I realized I had not carefully kept the floor number and the name of the place I was returning to, in mind. To go through the 20-floor building in the elevator, I needed the number of the floor I was returning to. My phone was not with me since I had thought I would not be needing it. Maybe it would have been a different story if it had happened in Ibadan. What then did I do? I had a mental picture of the reception so I went to every floor till I got to my desired destination. Even in a sea of difficulties, there will always be an Island of opportunities. And if it happens that the sea has no Island? What if we change the way we do things? Maybe our environment? Or just anything we might have considered insignificant. We are the best that has happened to humanity. But there is no bright morning without a very dark night. And there is no summer without a cold winter. Create the Island!
Photo credit: @cnn on Instagram