Bukola,
You
may think this is a grey area for me. But I have known love, too. It is the
sacrifice made by parents who would rather go hungry than see their children
naked. It is the effortless laughter and fast chattering of siblings packed in
a small space. I have enjoyed these and many more.
In
the intervening years between leaving and returning home, I have come back to the
taste of this love again and again as a refuge against life’s vicissitudes. But
when I finally left home the last time, taking with me the bricks and mortar for
the foundations of my independence, I found love in unusual places. It was an
accommodation offered to me by a stranger some minutes after learning that I was
stranded in a new state. This man became my landlord for the two weeks it took
me to advance my plans for an independent life.
It
is the kindness of undying friendship that I have received from that very small
constituency of people I have come to regard as friends. Not the ones that I have
a nodding acquaintance with in various chat rooms, but those who have showed
repeatedly, through words and deeds, prayers and actions, that man, we rise and
fall together as one.
So
I have seen love, Bukola. I have seen it in the stares of a young lady that I fell
foolishly in love with. I have beheld love in the immortal eyes of this lady
that was like a summons to all my foolish blood and wandering thoughts. Loving her
was the closest I came to having a religion; it was the closest I came to
having faith in God.
I
once stood with her for three hours at a park, chattering like the birds
perched on unsteady stalks; it was as if we had forgotten all the words for
seat in our mental toolbox. I later told her it was like a scene from a Raymond
Carver story collection that ends thus: ‘I could hear my heart beating; I could
hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not
one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.’
I
have found love in Literature. It is the abundance of writers who risked their
lives to write dangerously because they knew that one day, I will crawl on
bent knees to find healing in the intensive care units of their words and
sentences. To take refuge, seek humanity, faith, and silence from this noise
that the world has become. Bukola, this is what I talk about when I talk about
love.
