Epicondylitis

fiction

The words in the letter, like the news of his death, shocked us. It was 2013. He wrote about heaven, about girls, about fields. Pages of the letter, torn, soiled. He came that year, every three months that year, to do nothing but write. His car, planted on the arid streets. Children from the neighborhood frothing at the mouth, beaming, touching the bonnet, then running off at the sight of adults. How the dust and the slovenliness allow doodles on the glassiness of the car. The first page of the letter detailed his background. He was from Enugu. Born on a boat, escaping from death by war. His father waving hands on the other side, then gunned down in a second. The tales his mother told but did not believe. The second page, his sick sister. How they carried her from pillar to post. What the grief turned her into. How she died facing the creviced walls, murmuring. The third page, his first lesson on love. The heartbreak and the character development it rewarded. The fourth page, torn in careful altitudes, was on heaven, Jesus Christ, and the bible verses about holiness. It surprised us that he wrote on many things at once. We simply marveled.

His name to us was Abodunrin. We could not cope with the one he brought from Enugu. So we gave him one that meant he came with the year. Which was true because he came the day a masquerading was in play. He had been spotted first by Akanni. He said Abodunrin carried the world and its problems on his face. And so we sat him down in the long passage after the festival, fed him potatoes, and pressed his stomach so he can confess his troubles. We do not do this for everyone that comes our way, he was just different. A year later he had vanished off without trace. Three months he stayed wherever he was, refusing our calls, our pleas. So we forgot him and moved on with our lives. Then he returned back one night with a polished blue car and a briefcase. Shutting the door on even us, his only friends in Ìsẹ́yìn. And in the plain morning, he left again. Another three months to be extinct.

We discovered that the letter was not the only thing he had been writing. He was a creative writer, too. In a book that faced the wall in his room, he wrote about his sister who incarnated as his lover. He wrote about the war in Enugu and how the war did not swallow his parents. He wrote fiction, bending his own realities with words in a bid to reshape history. We cried. The things he did not tell us, the books in his room did. Once, we had all barged into this room, finding him at his table as usual, writing. He had been visibly scared, fearing we would take him away from the table, peeling him from his stream of consciousness. But we did not. We only laughed with him, joked about the country and the coming elections, about how his wrist will ache from too much writing, and we left. We did not know that he battled with many things. He told us little, just as we told him little. Men tell themselves little. Always holding back. So we cannot be blamed. It is now 2015. We do not touch his car. We leave it to collect more dust. To symbolise his memory. We grieve him this much this way.