A scream. I stop flipping through Arinze's God's children are little broken things, and stare ahead. A child sits on the makeshift grass, holds his leg out to his classmates who form a circle around him. I heft myself up, but don't move. Soon, the child on the ground sticks out his tongue and giggles. The others burst out laughing. "See your head; it was nothing sef," one of them says, smacking the head of the supposedly injured child, the group unfurls, each person returning to his position. The match resumes. But an impression is stamped across my chest. I smile.

These children remind me of a time so far-flung yet so close, when I was like them, young and restless. 

In those days, I mostly had one thing in mind: football. When I returned from the local primary school which was a few blocks away from our bungalow, I almost didn't greet my parents, barely washed off the day's heat or even had lunch. Without heeding my mother's call, I scampered out of the house to the backyard, to join the neighborhood children tossing around a leather ball.

I was five and in primary one. And until I repeated primary two, it hadn't occurred to me that the wick of my passion for football, for stunts—those few minutes I spent lurching up in the sky in stunning multiple swings before landing on the ground—during break time would begin to dwindle, slowly. 

"No more break for him, biko," my mother said firmly to my class teacher, her lips taut as she handed me over to the woman like she was delivering a parcel. "Please, Christy, keep an eye on this boy before he becomes useless," she said, knotting the edge of her wrapper in the folds of flesh beneath her armpit, a strain in her voice, as though she was about to cry.

Later, at a corner of the class, in the midst of strangers—who were supposed to be a year behind me in class—lips buzzing with words, a tear snaked down my eyes and I decided to be more intentional about my life, my academics.

2010. I was in Junior Secondary School Three. And I had managed to keep both my love for football and my fervour for academic excellence alive, fanning both embers, raising the stakes without completely forfeiting one for the other. Although there was an air of sophistication in the way I played football with my classmates, I was satisfied with knowing that I hadn't turned out a bookworm.

It baffles me how we lose things, sometimes facets of ourselves. Just like I know longer find pockets of joy in playing football, or just strolling to a game center to watch football matches. How did this aloofness for football creep into my life? When did it find expression in my routine? Perhaps, this is time and chance happening to me. Perhaps as we grow older, we pick other engagements from the wheels of adulthood and are constrained by them. Yet, it's so enormous, this loss, this vacuum crested into my life by the present reality. Maybe all I have now are the memories—lamps leading the way, cushioning this void.