I remember the teenage girl you once were. Standing in your gold and brown sweetheart neck bridal party gown. That was one of your happy days. Do you remember how pretty you felt? It was the closest feeling you have felt to being a princess.
Do you remember the long road trip with family and friends for your uncle’s wedding in Minna? You remember feeling so road sick yet excited, all the Hausa snacks you tried for the first time that will eventually form part of some core memory. Do you remember the boy who showed interest in you at the church, and even then, you knew you couldn’t be together, and it is not like you even knew what that meant? You were too young to understand that concept, even though the yearnings were already budding.
Do you remember the smell of Aunty Rose? Is that even her name? I mean the home lesson teacher who taught you in primary school. Remember that really nice teacher who liked your younger brother a lot and ended up adopting all three of you. Do you remember the first they you made egg puddings in school in milk tins, the rainy days in crown and coronets with the plastic cups and teas that taste like watery milk with a hint of something you still can’t place now, you definitely remember the taste of akara and bread. The piggy bank and play dough from school, the christmas carol and prize giving days.
There’s a day you don’t often remember, but it still comes to you every now and again. You were supposed to attend a conference centre event held by your faculty, but instead of taking the bus as you normally would, you walked through the forest with a couple of your male friends. Remember feeling scared when you had to jump through streams and walk through the forest, how you thought you’d never make it to the event centre, but you eventually did.
Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere, but I think there was something about that day that frightened you. Maybe it is the fact that you had zero sense of direction, or the fact that you had to trust others for your safety even though they happened to be your friend or maybe it is the novelty of the journey and the fact that you have never associaed the forest with safety and the many wild thoughts that kept popping in your head about how things could turn south super fast.
Do you remember the first time you ever saw ‘Saworoide’? I don’t know what it is about this movie that just really stayed with you. Even now, when you watch this movie, it seems like it reaches a part of you that cannot be named. A respect for culture, origin, ancestry, value, and something ancient. Is it the music or the message, the simplicity of life as it were when this movie first touched you?
Do you remember the first time you were affected by a dead person in a movie and how scared you were to sleep that night? Remember the days of agogo ewo, and koto aye, the days of Nkanbe and the diamond ring ( I think this movie gave you PTSD for years to come).
You remember that Christmas that you spent at Silverbird Galleria and later by bar beach? Oh dear, what about the drive to Ijebu with rustic apala music playing in the background as you doze on and off to fading trees through squinting eyes, looking at blue skies from resting on the car window as it leaves behind trails of red dust from the muddy clay road that lined the road to Molipa.
Remember how grandpa feeds you with so much meat on New Year’s Day that you often suffer a toothache and a stuffed stomach. All the money you will receive from uncles and aunties, grandma and grandpa, from going to ‘ile odun.’
The days of Maltina Dance Hall and Gulder Ultimate Search. Do you still remember the day you heard that Michael Jackson had died and how you found yourself profoundly grieving a stranger you found to be immensely gifted and beautiful? That day had an omen somehow because the camp also got flooded and some accidents led to the death of some people, that is, if you are remembering this correctly.
Do you remember Mrs Ojo? She had this quiet grace about her that you often wanted to emulate but never quite seemed to be able to replicate. Do you remember the night you read the Twilight saga for the first time? What about when you first read Mirror Image and that time HoneyPour introduced you to Sandra Brown? Do you remember your first time on a Virgin Atlantic flight and all the packages you stored from that flight? That was where you watched the movie ’13 Going on 30′. Remember the movie ‘The Wedding Date’. How about when you discovered Telemundo? Or do you want to talk about your very first Korean movie and your white Samsung PC?
The first time your dad introduced you to Anita Baker how that’s how your love for jazz would be birthed. Do you remember the day you started writing and how you wrote nonstop for hours that filled pages of 80-leaf notebooks? Do you remember every first day of a new term in primary school and the smell of your rubber sandals and white socks, white holes and laces? The after-school role play with friends at the backyard of the face me apartments in Bariga, where you lived. Remember that cake you ate that had nutmeg that gave you a taste for cakes with nutmeg in it, and how you discovered you hated raisins in cakes?
My dear girl, look how far you’ve come from the dreams that woke you up in sweat during the day, from flashbacks you pretend not to remember because it hurts, from dreams that were so big and now you live in. Remember all the vision of your craft and the happy memories in the rain. Warm sunshine on your back, happy walk back from school, the final day of law school, the start of a new dream, the end of a love story.
See baby girl, life is a mesh, a merger of accumulated memories, yet you never know just how many worlds you will get to experience within your world. The one inside your head and the one you live out daily. Hang in there, darling, there is beauty yet to unfold. I know you were sometimes a happy girl, just maybe you are unfolding into becoming a fulfilled woman.
Till next time,
Stay You.
Xoxo,
Dcconoissuer.
Connoisseur of Memories 