I

My memory has many gaps, and each one is filled with loss.

When I was somewhere between 13 and 16, I lost a best friend to cancer. I cannot recall what her face looks like anymore, but I know I cried for a week—heaving quiet sobs at night so I didn’t wake anyone at home up – not because I did not want witnesses to how my heart was breaking, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

I had always been a self-sufficient child anyway (later on, this self-sufficiency would be diagnosed as a symptom of something larger and mentally problematic).

Her death was my first brush with what grief can do to your heart and how your body hardens and folds into itself, an attempt to protect, like an eye does, closing just before a punch lands.

A decade later, another best friend died, and I shrank further. They died the morning after their birthday- it would be poetic if it weren’t so painful and if I no longer smelled their perfume randomly in places where they would likely be if they were still alive. 

This second dance with grief was slow and methodical, stepping on my feet deliberately, holding me while I tripped over myself—a cruel type of embrace. 

More bad things happened that I could not control, like being rejected by people who were supposed to protect me unless I contorted myself to fit the masks they wanted me to wear. 

There’s a film I loved watching while growing up—The Man in the Iron Mask. Its plot centres around freeing an iron-masked prisoner who had been imprisoned by his twin brother, the current king, and crowning him instead.

Perhaps I loved that film so much because I wore masks so often that even now, I find it difficult to tell apart what I am and who I was told to be. 

But the clincher, in the series of bad things that happened were the ones that I let be done to me.

A specific type of anger builds in your chest when you tolerate the intolerable and make peace when you should have torn everything to shreds. It boils into resentment, hardening your shell from the inside out. 

So it goes that you put all this together—the grief, the forced conformity, and everything in between—countless bits, big and small, hacked away from the softness I once had.

The only way I could see to survive was to gather the bits into a jar, climb into that jar and seal myself away until I became this hard body fused together by suffering and grief.

Thus, by my doing and undoing, I built a lack of trust in myself, and how can faith exist without trust?

How can I remember if I don’t trust myself? 

Yet my body remembers; it always does.

II

I often think of my memory's ability to keep me in a loop, a recurring autopsy of the past blown up on a big screen in my head, my own private cinema of tiny and major horrors showing these, amongst others:

• Yesterday when I woke up from sleep with limbs hanging off me like heavy palm fronds and a heart full of heavy psalms. My eyes opened to greet another day, waiting to pull me under and suffocate me with its requests for a person I was weary of being.

• Months ago when another rejection fell into my lap like a palm oil spill, red, heavy, and soaking. I lied and said I didn’t even want that thing that much anyway, but the way my body drags itself tells the truth - I needed that win badly. 

• Years ago, when the sickness moved from latent to active, defying all my attempts to tame it or, at the very least, quiet it down. 

On an interlude in an album I love, Nina Simone says, “Do you know what freedom means to me? No fear!”  Miss Simone, all I know is fear, but I paint it prettily and say, ‘It’s just been one of those days.’ 

It’s been one of those days for a long time, and I am becoming akin to a dead thing. 

Sure, I make the motions of a living body. I eat, sleep, laugh, and dance on days my feet and hands remember the freedom of movement. I breathe in air and keep going like I know exactly how to be a person.

But I am growing tired of it. 

Every other day, I walk around feeling weighed down by the knowledge that I am two well-timed cracks away from the performance of living splitting open to reveal the truth of a hard existence. 

The common cliche is that the truth will set you free. Cliches exist because they hold a sliver of accuracy. So maybe the truth will set me free if I know how to stretch towards it or angle my body just right and let it remember what it was like to be soft, like water, tender enough to cleanse without washing away my essence.

I have seen softness on other people and how it blends them into better versions every day.

I have felt it from them, how they hold me carefully and treat me like I am worthy regardless.  And as Ocean Vuong aptly said, “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”

Occasionally, I get flashes of when I have been a soft person.

Holding my brother’s hand inside a taxi and whispering silent prayers, on our way to the school where he would write his university entrance examinations. 

My mother and I falling into easy laughter over the years, looping across my memory, how easy my body felt, so light I could float. 

Hugging my friends so tightly I couldn’t tell where the other person’s body ended or began. 

In all of these moments, a recurring chorus sings of how the hearts I held and the ones that held me did not have to suffer bruising from brushing against the harsh angles of who I had become. 

But they are few and far between. I can count them, string them like beads on twine, a beautiful necklace for a version of me I can no longer conjure up.

III

For years, It physically hurt to be hugged. My breath would become hitched in my throat, and my lungs would forget their function when somebody pulled me into an embrace. I just wanted to escape and go somewhere far away, where no one could reach my skin.

To be touched meant feeling my body, and that was a pain I was unwilling to face. It was touch starvation by choice, and it was brutal, like taking a whip to my own back.

There were also places I physically could not go because the air, the people, and the structures reminded me of too many terrible things I had lost the name for but still felt the depth of terror about. 

It is frightening to exist in a body that has moved from protector to prison. 

I think, no, I know. If I am to do this right, I have to be sure—I know I was not always this way. If those flashes of who I have been when I allowed my body to yield and give in to feeling and being felt hold any truth, it is that I was not always this way. 

If I could turn back time and go back several iterations before the fear and unyielding, I would stop time after the first five losses and the first three masks. 

I would pause precisely at the point where I still saw myself as a person, not an autopilot, acting on command, while the real me was coiled somewhere in a repressed emotional coma. 

IV

Whenever you wake up is your morning

- Nigerian Proverb 

“Allow yourself morning.”

-Bassey Ikpi

The body is a dull instrument at the worst of times and an orchard capable of multiple blooming at the best of times. Its capability to be one or the other rests in our hands, more often than it doesn’t, but because it takes so much strength to move from dull to bloom, we remain passive.

In the middle of 2023, while researching about the practice of Alchemy, I read a quote by Zeena Schreck: “If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend simply being a survivor, use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold.”

Alchemy fascinates me, the transmutation and iterations, one thing into another, many things into one, one thing into many.

It is as close to magic as it gets. Dare I say it is magic? 

I want to perform that magic on myself. 

I want my body to lose its hardness, and with that loss, a door will open, ushering in a version of me that knows how to be soft and delights in the lightness of being. 

Whenever you wake up is your morning is one of my favorite sayings. 

It holds an acknowledgement of the past and a promise for the future while still grounding you in the present.

I have woken up. It is time to be soft again.