Maybe tomorrow everything will be fine. Maybe tomorrow I won’t have this sick feeling in my stomach or the guilty throbbing in my chest. Perhaps, I won’t feel as empty as I feel right now. Maybe tomorrow I can go back to the man I used to be. But today; today I just lie in bed, blinds drawn, phone switched off; thinking that if I can be absolutely still, the earth will not rotate and we shall all remain in this moment forever, for how can I allow the seconds to speed away unabated, leading me gradually to the consequences of my actions?

The whirring of my rechargeable fan and the noise of my neighbour’s generator in the background disturb the stillness. I turn off the fan but I can’t turn off my neighbour’s generator. I soon begin to sweat because even though the windows are open, the heavy blinds prevent any breeze from getting in. I still don’t turn on the fan. I prefer to continue sweating than to shatter whatever stillness I have managed to create.

As much as I try, I know that I can never keep my mind in the present. The past keeps flashing before me like a cinema screen. I can feel the beads of sweat on my scalp deep under my thick hair, trickle down to my forehead. The sheets are soaked. The heat I feel right now has no bearing on the weather or the lack of ventilation in my room.

My sanity is in serious doubt. But if I am able to doubt my own sanity, then how could I possibly be insane? So maybe I am at that precarious border between sanity and outright madness.

I chuckle at the bizarreness of my situation, pondering my level of insanity when death looms. Surely, the wages of sin is death but the choice between death and insanity is an easy one. I only need to prove that I was out of my mind when I grabbed Esohe by the hair and smashed her face continuously on the bathroom sink until she stopped screaming that I was hurting her and began to bleed until she passed out.

I can claim provocation. I was sufficiently provoked. My manhood was called to question. But wouldn’t that make me an insecure bastard? Or confirm that I am not and will never be man enough? What does that even mean? Man enough. Man enough. Man enough… Oh shit, I just want to crawl into oblivion and remain there forever. I had always known that I will never be good enough for her. No, not me. I knew she would never find me good enough, but I was available and she was desperate and we were able to temporarily drown out the sensible voices that whispered reason into our heads. We drowned them out with our endless confessions of love, screaming “I love you” so vehemently to each other in an attempt to convince ourselves that we were in love. Why? We needed to justify wanting to get married and love was the perfect excuse.

Her voice replays endlessly in my head with words that pierce deep into my soul, “You can never, and you will never be half the man that Bosun is. Not with your dysfunctional brain, empty pocket or that thing you still believe is a penis.”

I wish there is a way I can reach into my head and yank the voice out, not because of the damage her words have done to my heart, but because I still find her voice intoxicating. Somehow, that voice, even though spitting venom, still seems to calm my nerves. My mind drifts back to the first time I heard the voice; the moment it hit my ears, I knew I wanted to hear it over and over and over again, for the rest of my life. It wasn’t smooth, silky or seductive, it was fiery, full of life and energy. Sharp enough to pierce through my soul and strike a chord that would resonate endlessly through my entire being. The feelings her voice evoked in me were too strong and exhilarating and exhausting to be love.

Chuks said I must be mad. That was the only explanation he could give for a full-blooded hunk of a man like me to be obsessed with a woman’s voice when there were other seductive body parts to justify obsession. He even said that if it were her eyes, he would understand that she had bewitched me with a magical look.

I chuckle at the thought of Esohe as a witch. No, she was too strong a woman to rely on the supernatural for help. Esohe, Esohe, Esohe…

Her name; that is all I can hear in my head now. No, I hear a loud banging sound too. They alternate; Esohe, bang, Esohe, bang, Esohe, bang…

Also Read: Dancing With The Waves | By: Victor Olugbemiro

I am hearing voices now. Must be the voices of Bunmi and neighbours. Esohe had somehow regained consciousness minutes after I went to lie on the bed. The door leading to the bathroom was half open and I could only see her head and not her hands as she reached into her pocket and dialled Bunmi’s number. I saw her as she put the phone to her ear and I rushed to her and smashed the phone on her head repeatedly till the sight of blood made me nauseous again and I returned to the bed.

Bunmi, that shameless slut who was thirty-four; unmarried and unbothered. She must have spent the better part of her younger days sleeping with sugar daddies and turning twenty-one each year. Now no one wanted her.

Unfortunately, there she was at my door, pointing my nemesis in my direction. I always knew that she was no good.

I begin to laugh, not that I find anything funny. I feel that laughing will convince Bunmi and her gang that are banging on the door that I am mad. I pick myself up and rush to the bathroom where Esohe still lies unconscious in a small river of blood. Don’t know if she’s dead, don’t know how to check. I just pick her up and hold her in my arms, still laughing and whispering the sweet words we used to share when the deceit was at its peak.

I hear them break down the door and make their way to the room. Bunmi the Slut gets to me first and tries to pull me away from Esohe but she can’t move my bulky frame. She calls out to the others for help and two hefty men who were hesitant to enter the bedroom rush to me and pry Esohe loose from my grip. They fling me to a corner and concentrate on reviving her. Everything turns blurry to me and I can’t pick out faces anymore, only shapes. All of a sudden, I become intensely sad because the thought of losing Esohe to death, a death caused by my own hands, depresses and frightens me.

No. I must not lose her, so if she is dead, then I must join her too and we shall be together in eternal marital bliss; achieving in death, what we couldn’t achieve in life. Immediately, I get up and head for the kitchen. One of the hefty men thinks I want to make an escape and he follows me. I beat him to the kitchen and grab the long-serrated knife. As he moves close to me, I drive it into my heart with all my strength. Just before I blackout, I hear slut friend say with relief, “Thank God, she’s alive!”

I have always loved looking out the window of anything; cars, houses, classrooms, libraries. I just love seeing the free movement of people and different things while being confined to a space. Growing up, when we moved to a particular house that overlooked a major road, I would sit at the window for hours and just look. One of the things that attracted me to the window was a large house with a mighty compound across the street. The owner kept horses and their stable was visible from our living room window. Now that I think of it, maybe the owner of the horses was a polo player, but as a child, I often wondered why anyone would have up to eight horses in his house. Anyway, I loved seeing them, graceful creatures that they are.

I won’t forget a particular spectacle one night that my brother woke me up to see. There is a festival of the Berom people that used to take place in Jos every year, the Nzem Berom. I don’t know what they celebrate but that night, long after the celebrations were over, drunk young men staggered past our house on their way home, putting up a variety of hilarious drunken displays. Locally brewed beer is not for the weak.

This is not about horses though or Berom youth, drunk on very potent burukutu. This is about the day, many years later when, as a teenager, I beheld one of the most graceful, fluid, colourful and mesmerizing cultural displays I had ever seen. The house that we lived in then was in Lagos and my bedroom window overlooked the car park of our estate. Nothing much to see except neighbours going out and coming in and outside the gate, a noisy, traffic congested Lagos road.

The car park was the biggest in the estate which meant, whenever there was a party, it took place in that car park, right under my window. On this day, the party had started and there were so many people and so much noise. More annoying was the fact that it was a traditional wedding ceremony and the proceedings were of course not in English so I couldn’t follow what was going on just by listening.

All of a sudden music started playing; traditional music. It wasn’t so fantastic but the rhythm had a way of making you want to move your body. I shuffled to the window and pulled up the curtain just in time to see some pretty damsels glide into the arena. Their faces were dotted with white paint and glitter and their bodies, from the hair to the feet. were covered in all types of adornments. They swirled and stomped their feet to the rhythm of the beat, moving their torsos and arms with such fluidity that you would think they had no bones. They smiled and put so much attitude into the dance, drawing their audience into the energy of the dance.

There are a lot of traditional things that I detest and believe should be in the trash where they belong, but I love cultural displays and that display that day made me resolve that I must marry an Efik woman. I didn’t know the name of the dance then but now I know it’s called the Ekombi dance.

The Efik people are found majorly in parts of Cross Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, as well as in Bakassi which is now in Cameroon. This is probably why there are similarities between the Ekombi dance and a dance of the Oroko people of Cameroon.

Ekombi dance is a reflection of the belief system of the ancient Efik people. Just like many other riverine ethnic groups, they believe in water spirits and divinities know as “Ndem” which are lesser in heirarchy than the supreme being “Abasi.”

“It is believed that sometime in the indeterminate past, during a moonlight play, an Ndem took possession of a beautiful maiden. While under the enchantment of the water spirit, the maiden began to dance. The dance steps and entire body movements of the maiden including her demeanor were remarkable, enthralling and riveting. This dance was named Ekombi. The dance became the dance of the initiates of the cult of water — sprits, in praise of and worship of water gods and goddesses.” Affiah & Owan (2018)

This perhaps explains why the dance appears to be mimicking the movement of the waves, undulating and swirling in a somewhat irregular yet synchronised pattern. Another dance that has movement of the torso, similar to the Ekombi, is the Swange of the Tiv people of Benue state. Though Swange appears to be more energetic with snakelike movement rather than wave like movements of Ekombi.

I gather that in contemporary times, especially when performed at weddings, the Ekombi dance marks the end of the fattening room experience. A bride must dance to show that she is fully prepared for marriage and has all the attributes of a good wife. It is also an opportunity for the other maidens who dance with her to be noticed by prospective husbands. So possibly, those maidens that were dancing in my estate that day were trying to catch my attention and I was ‘dulling.’ Too bad. I’m still happy that I witnessed the Ekombi dance live and it sparked in me an interest in cultural dances.

I’ve seen many forgettable cultural displays but the Ekombi dance is not one of them. Neither is the Goje dance of the Jukun tribe in Wukari, or that of the Afizere people of Plateau state or the Swange of the Tiv. Bata dance is another fascinating dance. I don’t know where this interest in cultural dances is leading to but I will continue to explore.

To think of it at all is a mirage. Bet you can remember those days when a visitor comes into your living room holds those tender arms of yours and asks you that ageless question “what do you want to become in the future” smiles runs down your cheeks as you answer with the innocence of a child, I want to become a………..
Yes, you could remember yourself acting into the future, being the person of your dreams. You were the young doctor who happened to have treated your friends who feigned sickness while you were acting out those your poorly constructed scripts…hahahahaha. The engineer who in the name of repairing your sound speakers ended up complicating things. You were the nurse who stood by mum’s side when she was down with fever. The accountant who loved to tuck in the shirt and look very formal in appearance, do you remember if anybody or anything tried to hinder you in appearing or behaving in a way that tandems with your childish dreams, all you could do is cry? You were beaten and probably spanked for what was deemed to be a troublesome behavior yet in your own very eyes, you were living out your own very dreams.
Maybe I need to ask you why? It begs a question that has always been pondering on my mind. Must we all be entrepreneurs? Or rather are we all cut out to become entrepreneurs?
A very popular media mogul and serial entrepreneur as described by herself, speaking at the 2017 edition of the WIMBIZ said that not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur but are meant to be part of a team. She also retorted, that finding one’s purpose is a very difficult process but youth gives us the opportunity to dream and explore several opportunities.
In a nation where majority of its youth are unemployed, it’s safe to say that being an entrepreneur, is the way out. The popular saying ‘Think of what you can do for your country rather than what the country can do for you’ has been so much over-flogged that it has become nothing more than just mere hearsay; a platform under which “they” have chosen to hide throwing the gauntlet down to our faces.
The youth of today are very lazy they say; “they have everything to their advantage yet they have refused to make use of them” calumny at its best, mostly a case of trying to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
Why must everything be circumstantial? I ask! Can’t I just have the boldness to pursue my dreams and have a country to support me? I ask, is this a country that would enable those childhood dreams to become a reality or one that crumbles it on the altar of subsistence.
Not everyone wants to become the next Aliko Dangote or Tony Elumelu, neither are we seeking to become the next Folorusho Alakija. All we want is a nation that allows us to live out our dreams or what we choose to become. Modest as it may seem, the satisfaction and happiness it brings, is one that cannot be rivalled.
Some of us would still have to taste that pill of reality, we would have to fight for that dream of ours and this is not the best of times for us as a nation. I know the government is doing all in its power to encourage more youths in taking up entrepreneurial skills, facing the reality of a dwindling economy but then, you can also do something to encourage the aspiring biologist; engineer; lawyer, accountant; journalist; Architect; economist; environmentalist; educationist; scientist; linguist; broadcaster……….. The list is endless.
So when you see any of my fellow young aspiring folks walking along the street with a paper bag in their hands and a bag pack on their backs, it’s okay for you to laugh, you could have your own objections and opinions on what they should be doing or on whatever you think about them, but never you call them lazy. They are battlers fighting for their lives, careers and future.
Someone would need to pay the price now for the upcoming generations and it’s certainly not going to be those who are seated in the corridors of power, neither is it going to be my aged parents, that’s going to have to be me. The next Ben Carson, Phil Emegali, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Steve Jobs, Chike Obi, Grace Alele-Williams, Dora Akunyili, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and many more of such we one day aspire to become. Can’t you see that this dreams of ours, are so great and we can’t just let go of them?
So please do us a big favor. If you feel helpless in making these dreams of us become a reality, stop making yourselves impediments to our efforts in making them a reality. For we have already, a great battle on our hands and there are some of us who would rather die fighting for our dreams than taking the so called circumstantial way out.
….. For we would not all become your entrepreneurs.