I remember primary school, where I would walk down the corridor or join a conversation, and they would call me a girl. I would think nothing of it, because my workings-out of the world I was born into were still as faint as dawn light. A girl is a human being, not an animal, yet there was something in the way they said that word “girl” that made me think of shame. I would act beautifully in the school drama club and draw well in Fine Arts class, little conquests shorn of real effort, and win prizes for the school. I was a star, obvious and oblivious. To me, the sky was wide for all of us to co-glitter. I was a boy who was also a girl. I was being. I was everything I could ever be.

In secondary school, the air around me became dark, gravid with grittier whispers. “Look at him, so lanky, so soft-looking, just like a girl.” I would stumble, or stutter, or just sit somewhere, my lips shut, my eyes darting around, alert to dangers because I was eleven years old but new to a world where nothing was more criminal than being you.

I had been writing since primary 4, plays written in Yorùbá about kingdoms and dynasties and wars. I also wrote unfinished reams of fan-fiction of Enid Blyton High School classics. But, in secondary school, where teachers said everything about other children but nothing about children like me, my gaze shifted. I could talk at home, where my girliness was not an issue, but how exactly could I squeeze a whole fresh education of life into words I found easy to say to my parents? At that age of jarringly painful self-awareness, how could I give language to what I was feeling when what I was feeling seemed too enormous for my pre-puberty body to carry?

So I turned to my empty pages and started writing about different children. Because I was too terrified to write directly about me, I wrote about a child born of a witch, born as a witch, and who grew up to fall in love with a witch-hunter. I wrote about animals that could talk but chose not to. I wrote about a husband at the mercy of his wife. I wrote about difference.

It was supposed to be a simple novella. A slim, supernatural-cum-romance trope. But I finished a full Higher Education and continued into another, and used that one up, too. I was a burst tap. I was a re-educated child revolting, whirling his way into a world shiny with knives. If a boy touched my skin in class, my body answered, nodded between my legs. But it was like a telephone call no one must ever pick up. So I wrote to empower these answers. To testify to the difference in my story. It became a novel, a full-length boundlessness. Then it became a trilogy. My classmates saw me writing and asked to look. When I let them look, I realized that I had diverted the scrutiny from me to characters that could carry my blame in ways that could never be traced back to me.

Is this what writing does, or what we do with writing, construct characters and push our blame into their lives and acts and non-acts, in ways that cannot be traced back to us?

I was not popular as I had been in primary school, because I folded my interesting parts neatly away until they became forgotten props in my acting. But, since people started reading my first sequel-novel manuscript, I became renowned in every class I was moved into, in all my six years there. Some people asked me to ask my readers for money. I didn't ask for their money. It had not occurred to me to ask for money. That they read me, not knowing what I hid inside what I had written, was enough satisfaction. I took a Sellotape and left the three thick Higher Education notebooks bound, so that they wouldn't get misplaced. But they did. Someone passed them to someone else without coming to give me first and that one gave yet another person and they stopped coming to school.

I lost the warmth of my little telephone.

I was naked. I couldn't cower into stories anymore. I couldn't weaponize my escape anymore. The book was lost but my name was still on many lips. One afternoon in SS class during Free Period, while I wrote unsolicited reviews of ‘Purple Hibiscus’ on the chalkboard, a classmate stood behind me and boomed into my ear: “Formable!” And they took it up, everyone in class, some temporarily, others permanently. It was an inane neologism, almost meaningless, in fact meaningless to me, until the giver said to me that it meant I could create stories, form stories, out of anything. If he sees my Facebook profile bio today, he will wonder why I have now started ‘destroying’ stories.

In SS2, I fell in love with a boy who limped. So I became a poet. I bought a new Higher Education and started filling it, page after page, day after day. If a bird flew past, I would see my crush in its beak and write about it. Sunsets were my muse, a sad colorful but brief ending, and each sunrise made me write of glowing angels, of reawakened hope. I also wrote, of course, poetry that had nothing to do with love, but I knew why I had bought that notebook. I needed to say to it things I couldn't say to him. I told him that I loved him, through a letter, which he read with his friends, but I did not tell him that my love for him was a tourniquet twist around my neck every time he walked past me without looking in my direction. I told him about my difference, how it had not mattered at all when I was still a young boy just being. But I did not tell him about the cuts I'd made on my wrists, and why I was not ashamed of them.

I lost the poetry book too, an ambitious anthology in which I had high hopes, the evidence of my doomed teenage love. I lost it. Then I lost him.

I was naked again, unable to find a story that would stay as long as my difference had stayed with me. It was as if my difference was a jealous mother who would never allow me have the sole protection of another one. So, in university, I left my vulnerabilities bare. There was Facebook and the first wave of friends I had were lovely pastors and nice moralists who loved me just as much as they loathed my difference. So I wrote without telling them I was guilty of that difference they saw in other students. I made mistakes. Fumbled. Rose and dusted my pen, because I grew up in a home where you fell down and must pick up something. You did not stay down there crying. No one would take you seriously. I had a laptop into which I was typing my stories. I wrote my first collection of stories, titled ‘Monday Is Too Far’. All those stories, not one of them hinted at my difference. I had done it in the past and lost the entire thing. I could not risk it again. So, instead, I wrote about politics, terrorism, the abduction of schoolgirls, the ruins of republic after republic. I wrote about jungle justice and, anytime there was a strike on campus, or a demonstration by the student union or a thief was caught in the hostels and paraded half-naked, I wrote about ‘no light, no water, no power, no dignity’. That was from 2016.

The morning my laptop crashed, a fatal finite tragedy, I closed the screen and walked out of my room in Fajuyi Hall, Block 5, and downstairs. I did not stop walking until I entered the Common Room, where I sat to watch Yorùbá films. My phone beeped that day, a message alert from Facebook, and I started replying. The reply was long and lyrical, and lurid. It became an instruction, a prophecy. I began to make long posts on Facebook. I began to type the way one would type into a laptop. Nobody read me, or—at least—nobody showed that they read me. But I turned Facebook into my sanctuary. My mother beyond the reach of my jealous one, the one who killed every child I struggled to push out of my weeping pod. I did not bother if Facebook would also fail me. I did not worry that the collective beauty of my children would be diminished, restricted and polarized by a platform where everybody wanted to know what you wrote but, when they did, nobody really gave a fuck. All I did was remain and renew and recall myself in small portions.

The day a lady, an already-at-the-time accomplished published writer, made a post about me being her official favorite writer and tagged me, I held the phone to my chest and finally started weeping the years backward. I read that post five million times. (Full disclosure: I stopped being her favorite when she later realized I'm gay.)

I have lost many stories, heaps and heaves of my core, my inspiration, memories I will never get back, letters I can no longer name, but I can never lose my endlessness, the God-breath, the ever-unfolding essence of my being, because—I know and it is true—I AM A STORY.

The boy who had always been different, and will be, until the winds call him home.