Fiction or Nonfiction

FAILURE.
I have forgotten the taste of failure. I have forgotten how the cold the hands can be at the touch of failure, of not succeeding. I have survived a long time without failure I do not even know that the enemy still exists. My lack of failure however does not mean I have always succeeded. It simply means what it means: I have not failed at anything in a long while.

Until now.

Because our generation witnessed the birth of people like Mark Zuckerberg, nothing is offline anymore. Our schools are online. Our exams are online. Our results are online. Some parents are online. Some families exist only on Facebook and WhatsApp. Most common of all is our results being online. You sit in a tense hall to write your exam but you lie on your bed to check the result. And then you check and see a strange number. Not 50. Not 45. Not even 40. This is how failure reaches out to you. It comes with a pen and a paper. It says, ‘It’s been a while, pal. I still exist. Write about me.’
THE HOSPITAL.

This place is a home of sickness. It is where we all come to talk about our woes, to treat our woes. My own woe is a swelling toe. My big toe is swelling up. I do not know why. Things like this only appear in Yoruba movies when a certain Ifa Priest has finished consulting the oracle over someone. I do not know they can come to life. 

I enter the hospital by 9am and write my name down. I go and take a seat, waiting for my file to be taken to the doctor so he can call me up. 10am, I am still waiting. My toe is still big and pus is coming out. 

11am. I am stuck in the waiting room. A girl is carried in by her friends. She cannot walk without help. I shift and she sits beside me. She is hot. I don’t need to touch her to know. You don’t need to touch the sun to know it’s hot. Her two friends are panicky. They go and write her name for her and tell the attendant that she is in immense pain. The vulture craned her head and brings her glasses down to her nose. She smirks and returns to her records. Her sparse head will make the Sahara jealous.

12pm. The girl beside me is crying. Me, I am the son of my father. I will not cry. And then the pain comes. I try to find the best position to place my leg. There is none. And then the girl is screaming. Everyone is looking at us. I am scared for her. I don’t know how to react to this. I can see tears streaming down her face. Her friends run to the vulture. She has gone hunting for carcass.

12:30pm. I am now more worried about this girl than I am about my leg. Don’t these annoying people know what they call emergency? Someone is in pain here, and has spent close to two hours in the waiting room. Just as I am about to lose control, the vulture comes in and calls our names. I am almost out of the waiting room when I realis that the girl is still on her seat. Her name was not called. 

This is how we kill ourselves and blame the fallen angel.

LOVE.

I think I have fallen in love. Wait. How do you when you’ve fallen in love? Do you have dreams and see her in those endless dreams? Do your bones become cold when you hands touch in a simple handshake? Is your seeing her every time you look at your books a sign of love? What is this thing that is ‘doing’ me? 

Her glasses is like a magic mirror. I look into her eyes and see both of us standing side by side, holding hands. Her tender skin is heavenly. She is the music of my soul. She is the reason I write poetry. Is this love? I have not been reading any Harlequin of recent neither have I been watching some Fifty Shades of Grey. But I have been listening to Kodaline. 

Guys, this is a call for help. How do you guys manage this thing? A brother once warned to not fall in love yet. But then, can we really control love? Is there ever a time when we will be able to say boldly, ‘I am ready’? Does love have a proper timing? Or is this just that rush of emotions you feel when you are too close to someone? But then, is that not a sign of love?

I have always feared this moment. This moment when I will not have blogged for weeks only to come back here and tell you that the girl with glasses has stolen my heart. But then, this is it. This is how it begins.

NOTE: I think this is my shortest blog post ever. Do you like it or should I stick to my epistles?

Photo source: Unknown.