Hiatus
Four Months In Abeyance
I miss this place, and these past months have been a bittersweet drag.
In January 2024, I launched the most marketable book of my writing career. It had taken two excruciating months to finish it. In February, I almost gave in to the depression that once in a while colors the darker side of my fragile world. That same month, I had a video call with an old friend holding a BAFTA mask — an ACTUAL F@#!ING BAFTA.
In January, I turned 40 and of my volition, that day passed quite uneventfully like most of the 14,598 days before it. In the days that followed, I courted nostalgia, rode immortal Danfo buses on their umpteenth existence, and dropped on and off the treadmill of waking, striving, sleeping, and repeating the process every day.
… and while life was lifing as they say, I stopped writing.
So What?
There is this story I was told in my younger years of a man who stumbled upon an Alujonu — a creature from the world of daemons that both spoke in the voice of men and the gods. This Alujonu had the power to make men’s wishes come true so it asked the man for his dearest desires and the man let the spirit deep into his heart. “If I have such and such a thing,” he said, “my life would be perfect.” Not long after, his wish was granted and his life was perfect … but only for a little while.
After the glow of novelty had diminished, and the sun of the familiar began to set on his dearest dreams, time began to take away the joy he’d once felt about this thing he once coveted. Gradually, another yearning took its place to the point that he could no longer bear its torment. So, yet again, he summoned the Alujonu.
“What do you want this time?” The otherworldy granter of wishes asked. “I want something else,” the man intoned, “and if I have this one, my life would be perfect.”
The spirit looked deep into the soul of this unfortunate man and beheld what he’d seen in other men like him since the first of their kind roamed the earth. There is no rest for them. But duty-bound, it granted this man’s wish again and went the wind’s way.
I find joy and fulfillment in creating things from strands of thought woven into a tapestry that I can hang out on the awnings in the bazaars of passing time. Ethereal vestments brought to life from the agony of creating to the admiration and mostly condemnation of the teeming masses that pass through this bizarre theatre where we trade time for vanity.
This joy manifests in my excitable state when I share my dreams with strangers or mount the mare of optimism and ride off into the wind. On most days, this is my place of peace. But the vagaries of life are like buffetting winds that contend with this stillness, hasten this joy I call mine, and carry it far, far away.
Work calls, adulting, money matters, planning, strategizing … and days, weeks, and months go by and I find myself lost, wondering what life would be if I lived more simply, uncaring for all these accoutrements of our modern existence. The pages of many yesterdays stare at me, and there is not a single word in its vastness. Nothing to unfurl my knotting mind; nothing to dispel my distant fears; nothing to say the things I ‘really’ want to say … at the very least.
Everything is bottled up. Random thoughts are scribbled down on the back of notepads and bank statements — ideas fermenting in idle state nudging me awake to keep me from forgetting the secret things they’ve entrusted to me. Unborn children of my imagination call me father in my dreams hoping that one day they would breathe through me.
Aderopo
My first feature film gathers cobwebs in sticky notes that decorate my garage walls in a Nashesque reminder of my familiar madness. Aderopo — that is what I will call her when she’s born. The sticky notes heralding her birth are connected by wooly twines — literal plot lines that connect one scene to another telling a reincarnation story that has tugged at at my skirts for six years now and counting. Yet, if you stand in that garage today facing that godforsaken wall you wouldn’t understand shit because pretty much all of it sits uncomfortably inside my head … waiting in my imagination, waiting upon my courage, waiting on the wall … for the breath of life.
When I say I miss this place, I’m sure you understand.
But what I may not tell you about is the strange sadness that Striving feels when Purpose chooses to build its homestead on the other side of the river. There are days that they come together on the narrow-arched bridge under which the river of time flows and everything is still, and perfect, like frozen scenes from the most pleasant memories. On those days, I reflect on the things of beauty my hands have made and I feel peace — the kind that makes you think, If I die now all is well knowing your last memories would be that of having lived an authentic life. On other days, I falter and fall into the currents and I flail as it tosses me here and there like a leaf shorn from its mother — torn from its stability. I cringe reflecting on these things even though I know that of all men, I am most blessed that I can understand these things.
I sit in remote places speaking in the company of others like me for whom ideas are the index fingers that point the way to the future. We love and laugh, bound by the grasp of our collective imagination; all of us, dreamers standing at the gates holding it open.
How I miss this place.
This place of quiet where my thoughts condense into inner monologues that find release on pages of the mind as I wish upon a star or look closer in the mirror of my afflictions. At such times when my soul is wrung out from yearning for a different reality, I hear the voice of the wind. Its whispers descend upon my restless heart, and it says, “Dwell in this moment — not in what you wish for of the things gone past. Dwell in this moment. Don’t let it pass you by.”
At times I listen, at other times I don’t — and I let the frustration of not doing eat away at my idols — the ones I built with these same hands. And like all things built of sand, I watch them disintegrate right before my eyes.
When I listen, I try to focus on the task at hand, no matter how mundane or rewarding. I catch myself saying, “Take your time. Keep your eye on the pleasant prize.” And I dance to the tune of my vocations while my heart longs for the beautiful things that words become in this unrelenting mind. I often dream that someday both worlds will embrace for one last moment and choose to be together forever, and on that day, vocation will lock lips with passion and stay with me forever. That day, the river of time will wash away the bridge and it wouldn’t matter because the land on both sides of the divide would converge. The water of time will still run underground keeping my roots alive. Then it will wash across the plains in gentle cascades that nourish greens, yellowing with pleasant bursts of purple.
When I say that I miss this place, I do.
But I am here now — breaking through the epiphragm, calling in the warmth of the marvelous sunshine. My thoughts (once again) find your voice. Ask life to reveal its deepest secrets. Bless these hands that till the rigid ridges and cause the earth to yield its abundance as seeds once buried in the mind become food for thought and a blessing for posterity.
Amen.
Osundolire Ifelanwa
