Finding the balance of things in
Like flotsam you float from one unknown place to another, to seek and establish equilibrium — only to have it all disrupted by a pandemic
You are here in this room, 45 square metres, warm, thankful that your concerns are only the concerns of half the world and that somehow, in this pandemic you are able to escape into a world full of worry. You can blend in, not having to expose the wounds that you have because everyone around is bleeding. If someone had told you it would take a pandemic to feel normal again, you would have called them a dreamer.
You know a couple of people stranded in Berlin and other cities, trapped by restrictions that either do not allow them to leave the cities they visited or return to the cities they came from. Every day they scour the news for word that they can finally escape this overextended trip, get back to their lives — or to what used to be their lives.
You have always worked from home so there is nothing to run to or hope for, no normalcy to reminisce about. Only your mind, from which there is no escape. When you first moved to Berlin from Abuja, you traded the sound of generators for the almost imperceptible hum of room heaters. Open sewers for paved streets, heavily spiced meals for bland food.
Traded love for the promise of love, warm weather year-round for grey winters and a spring that cannot decide if it wants to be chilly or warm. Family and loved ones for the cold distance of a larger, richer, wilder city. And always you weighed it on a scale. What you had gained versus what you had lost.
You did not wish for much, just for the things you had given up to be at least matched by the things you wanted to give up and what you gained in their place. This is what you have always wanted — that after every storm, you are able, somehow, to find balance.
Often you dream of your time in Abuja, your favourite Nigerian city. The city which built and broke you. You think of your favourite place there, where you often found escape — the hills around the dam that is the source of the city’s drinking water a few kilometres from the capital.
It was on the outskirts of Abuja that the perfect metaphor for how you felt presented itself to you. It was there, dancing delicately on the edges of that almost-still body of water called Usuma Dam: empty plastic bottles and cans of soft drinks, polythene bags, disposable cups and plates, a condom wrapper torn in a way that suggested urgency, a lone leg of worn-out slippers.
The word that first presented itself to you was flotsam. But then you thought, flotsam refers to debris and wreckage from a ship so, technically, the detritus from people picnicking at the dam isn’t flotsam. But you liked the word, so you used it anyway. Flotsam, you said out loud.
That is how the city made you feel then — floating aimlessly in a place with no soul, no flow, no character to its movement, nothing organic about its development. Flotsam, because you felt like you had fallen off the grid and couldn’t say what you had been doing there for six years since you moved from your home city, Kaduna, to go to law school and then work as a lawyer. Flotsam, because much of the wealth Abuja boasts of felt like the debris from a country wrecked by open theft and corruption — the luxury cars, the gaudy mansions.
You had always wanted to climb the hills around the dam but they always looked too steep — not something any of the shoes you had could execute. You had always skirted about the hills enough to contemplate the magnificence of the view and experience the thin freshness that you imagined the air up there must have. Skirting, another metaphor for how you lived, never really going the whole way.
Skirting. Like when a lovely journalist you barely knew asked you to be spontaneous and come with her on a long road trip and you said you’d think about it. You packed a bag but thought: “What if I have an accident? There are always accidents on Nigerian roads. What if there are people killing people on the roads? These things happen ...”
Skirting. Enough thought about being spontaneous to contemplate what nice things could happen, enough to pack a bag and feel the rush of blood to your head, but not enough to leave the house.
The dam was always lovely on weekdays because there was no noise or activity, no lovers looking for a quiet place to fondle, nothing to upset the balance of things. Only glossy colourful lizards you thought might be five-lined skinks with bright blue tails and olive-to-brown striped bodies.
As you hoped to see a snake or monkey, you walked trying not to upset the balance of things. You always walked gently, so as not to scare all the life creeping and crawling because you realised you were in their space.
Sometimes a city does this to you — makes you forget whose space you are in. Or maybe it is Nigeria, where personal space means little, where a passenger can start screaming in the name of Jesus in a crowded bus, or your neighbour, who is fasting,