by Adéfọlámí Adémọlá

 

I’ll die at thirty-five.

Or maybe I won’t, but I have always harbored a premonition in my underbelly that death will crawl into my bones, quietly, when I turn thirty-five. If you ask me how I know this, I cannot give you a suitable explanation because, truthfully, I have no idea how this feeling has stuck to the back of my mind.

Sometimes, in our depressive reverie, we play out visuals of our lives forward to a certain point where we can see through the threadbare façade of existence; a sort of virtual exploration of the probable things that our lives might likely turn out to become. Somehow, if we put all our experiences together, weigh them against our present realities, it is possible to ascertain the things that might befall a person—the knowledge of the past demystifies the past, clarifies the present, and illuminates the future.

It started when I was fifteen; at least that’s when I clearly understood what the number ‘thirty-five’, which always found a way to seep into everything I did, meant. For reasons I’d probably never be able to ascertain, I could never see my life beyond that age: you know how people picture themselves at age ninety, surrounded by children and grand-children, sporting a smile that leaked out tales of a life well-spent—even if it’s just for the camera—I have never experienced this bliss, this assuaging breath of fulfillment that portends a lengthy span of existence as a living organism. In my case, the dream of visualizing my future runs out at thirty-five, like sand in an hourglass. I could never see my life beyond the threshold of corporeal expiration that my mind has created.

I am twenty-five. Months after I became a quarter of a century, my life has been mired in a rollercoaster of experiences that make it seem as though the reality of dying at thirty-five has grown into a more vivid and likely possibility. Exactly five days after my birthday, I broke off an estranged and largely inadequate three-year relationship without so much as batting an eyelid. I do not have a problem with breaking off relationships; I have broken more that I care to admit, even if breaking wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do in those moments. However, it would be deceptive to say that breaking this particular relationship didn’t feel like breaking something inside me. The whole love thing is an experience I am continuously trying to get a hang of, so it was not the emotional attachment that made it worse. It was the fact that I felt like I had wasted three years of my life. For someone who seems to think that he’s got limited time, that hurts like hell. A week after that, I lost a friend, not to the dainty clutches of death, but to whims of my venomous mood swings; the calming, unchecked propensity to live life without getting too attached to people who, when the friendship becomes a bond, would hold me back from losing myself, closing off my mind, and running away from it all. All that mattered was maximizing the ten years my mind tells me I have left, if dying at thirty-five became a reality like I wish it did.

In my sophomore year in the university, my best friend introduced me to Dambudzo Marechera. Dambudzo was a Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. Apart from his radical outpost, iconoclasm, literary experimentation and his striking individualism, what attracts me to the cynicism of his existence was the fact the he died at thirty-five, of an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder. And not just that. The similarities in our penchant for social awkwardness, something that makes me call writers and other creatives, misfits. Our verbal daring and strange obsession for living life by the way we choose seems too close to home to be just a coincidence. Dambudzo was a virtual kindred-spirit. Because he shared most of my sentiments; at least from his writings, and anecdotes from people who knew him, about the way he lived his life. I drowned myself into imagining what his life must have been; the relentless drinking spree, the strong disregard for materialistic tendencies; the perception of life as a fickle, brittle string of physical occupation of the earth, nothing more. And more importantly, his love of his own writings.

We are never entirely in control of our consciousness. Our opinions are influenced by things beyond our definition; or even if we can define them, we still cannot cordon off our minds from being triggered by their profound efficacy. I know this feeling of intending demise is intensified by a cold, empty feeling of uncertainty that sinks into the innermost core of my being every once in a while, which sends me spiraling down into myself, into a place that freezes time, constricts my breath, chokes me with a barrage of unanswered questions that will never be answered. But, deep within me, seated like a rock, is a personal conviction of guilt, of self-immolation and damnation.

The first few weeks of being 25 have been saturated with recurring bouts of depression, emptiness, uncertainty, and a raging urge to walk away from everything familiar. It has been weeks of cold, sinking feelings spiced with a garnish of self-doubt—doubts about becoming a writer, about having a writing career that validates my abilities as a writer. Even amidst all the guilt and thinning dreams, though, death is an unyielding companion.

In the year I turned 18, I had my second bike accident.

The first time I was involved in an accident with a bike, I must have been 8. We were playing football that evening when one of the over excited boys fired an unnecessary long-range shot. In obeisance, the ball flew right out of the circumference of the make-shift field and crossed to the other side of the road. Because I didn’t want to pause the interesting flow of the game, I ran blindly into the road, with the intention to fetch the ball. That was when I slipped and fell. You wouldn’t believe what happened next unless you were there that afternoon. An oncoming bike crashed into me, sending me some inches away from the point of contact. Perhaps, because of the impact, the rider, who turned out to be one of my father’s church members, couldn’t pull the brake timely. So the bike ran blindly around my body and eventually stopped atop my chest, few inches away from my neck. With a little difficulty, the rider heaved the weight of the bike off my chest, and I stood up, still with the intention to retrieve the lost ball. The shouts of concern by all present didn’t make sense to me because I didn’t think that anything was wrong with me after the impact. I was whisked home by some friends, given food and drugs, and told to rest. That hurt like hell. I wanted to play football, and I didn’t think I needed to rest.

Death has always been a recurring feature in my life. I court it, flirt with it, and mostly live my life on the edge, with no fear of death, no holding back. There was not a time that I have ever been afraid of dying. Instead, I saw death as a departure. As surviving, too. As a means to an end, the end being eternal rest and tranquility, if truly we won’t continue our existence in another plane, another form. As Tolu Daniel says in his Barren Magazine essay, What Does It Mean To Survive? “an escape from the stress and the pain inflicted by life on the mortal body to a dimension of ease.” So all my life, I have always toyed with the idea of dying, and dying young. There are times when, after I have smoked a blunt or two, I meditate and fantasize about my death, creating scenarios of how I’d die and the circumstances surrounding my death. As gory as it might sound, these thoughts of death, especially when I am dealing with the mental issues that has become my fate in the ‘in-between moment’ when my head is an ant farm, help me to find clarity, and see things clearly. Somehow, death, at least the thought of it, is therapeutic for me.

My second bike accident came when I was much older and wiser. I was in my second year in the university when it happened. One bright afternoon, when the sun scorched the earth like it was threatening to burst out of the clouds and melt everything in its wake, I was dressing up to go visit a friend against my mum’s vocal warnings not to step out. Before then, she had always queried my restlessness, my inability to stay in one place. I always found a way to move about, even in confined spaces. My spirit animal must be a Cheetah or any other animal that finds it almost impossible to be static. It had never been something that I was comfortable doing. Every admonition to remain at home, especially when I was not reading, was seen as an attempt to kill me or lock up my existence in a physical space. So I shrugged off my mother’s warnings as just one of those things mothers always guilt-tripped their children into doing. So I jumped on a bike with my elder brother who was on his way to a social function. We had not ridden for more than five minutes when the bike plunged into a giant pothole, sending me reeling on the floor where I met the jagged road with my jaw. I could taste the blood on my tongue; it was warm and metallic that sunny afternoon. It tasted like pain, like the bitterness that comes with knowing that your body would be riddled with scars. It tasted like the sour fruit of disobedience and the associated repercussions. I looked at the bruises that had formed on my wrist and in that moment, I wondered why I had not listened to my mother. The friend I was going to see could have been visited the next day.

Perhaps, the striking thing about predestination or fate is how it chokes the mind in a fierce grip and banishes every idea of rational thinking. Then, even against reason, our hearts are trapped in an unwholesome movement in the direction of that which is bound to happen to us or even hurt us. A kind of hubris that intersperses with the false step that leads to the catastrophic fall in social, physical or intellectual pedestal. But if predestination was merely a fallacy, then maybe that afternoon that I collided with the crooked floor in a macabre dance, I was only paying for my disobedience, a particularly grave offence in the Yoruba worldview: “obedience is better than ritual/sacrifice”—a literal translation of “prevention is better than cure.”

Death always loomed over my body. I still tell people that I am surprised to be alive today. Because in all my life, I have always seen doom flickering somewhere around the fringe of my eyes. I remember for years, between the ages of nine and seventeen, I suffered from severe stomach upset. This stomach upset always came intermittently. And when it did, I always felt like it was the last time I’d ever experience that level of pain and distress. Because I always thought that death would finally overwhelm my weary body. But I was wrong, the pain did not kill me. Rather, it diluted my existence, soaked it with the bile of redundancy so much that I forgot how to be a happy, playful child. You’d find me in the house, with a book, chewing hurt and regret and the force of the pain that threatened to burst out of my bowels. I was nicknamed ‘Sickler’ by kids my age who thought that the only reason a 9 year old would live between hospitals was because he had to be very sick all the time. I was always in the company of my mother who, due to the frequent visits to hospitals and labs and even traditional medicine, was starting to look like a shadow of herself, with worry lines that shone against the flakes of her skin. I pitied her those times when I’d scream due to the pain and she’d watch helplessly, unable to do anything other than to pray for me, to assuage the pain. One of the worst things that could happen to a mother is to watch her child battle a pain that is beyond her powers. It eats her up, makes her feel worthless. Like it is her fault that her child is suffering from a great discomfort.

Through all the numerous medical tests and diagnosis that showed that nothing was wrong with me, I suffered greatly from a serious case of anxiety and panic attacks in anticipation of the stomach pain that would always resurface. Those times, it was hard to plan my future or things I wanted to do. Somehow, even my parents knew not to plan for things beyond two days because of the uncertainty that loomed. In a weird way, my life was not in my hands between the period when my stomach hurt. My life was at the mercy of something that even modern science could not comprehend.

Sometimes, the darkness you think you’ve left behind creeps back in, throbbing, thrashing about the mind, enveloping it in utter darkness. I am terrified of the intolerable in-between moments when my mind is caged in an opaque couch of mental turmoil and emotional distress. As such, distractions make the nights slightly bearable. “Being human is a condition that requires a little anesthesia.” Weed and alcohol becomes permanent feature of my night life before sleep, bits and pieces of it, is at least attained. There are times when I see cheesy television adverts warning against smoking and alcohol consumption and I begin to wander if perhaps, dying slowly is a form penance. The way the disease eats up a part of the body, weaken it, making it almost useless, and how the pain sets into the bones, slowly ebbing life away. I think about dying from a disease atimes. Pain for me is the first chapter in the cannon of departure.

We’re all suffering from something so, for some of us, our departure won’t be as a result of our physical inadequacies. There would be those of us that would exit through the axes of their mental realm. Some will go out through panic or anxiety arrests or seizure, some through the route of suicide fueled by years of living between the excessive recesses of the fragile human mind. I have lost many friends to the cold clutch of depressive phases, suicide and the many excesses that the human mind harbors during the quiet, tortuous in between moments when it is almost impossible to get out of your own head. This is how I will go out, I think. When depression hits consistently at an all-time high, and the mind is lost in moments of fluctuations between realities, and alcohol and weed are the lubricants that make the nights somewhat bearable, addiction, maybe mildly, sets in, and there seems to be an incomprehensible dependence on these soothing fuel. That way, you would have won a continuous stretch of temporary happiness, but then, the body loses something in return to the excessive consumption of substances used for mental tranquilization. That is how it is for some of my friends. Not me. For me, I am at the point where I indulge consistently in the use of alcohol and weed. Although they ease the pain, I do not see them as indispensable elements necessary for my mental stability. But if they were, I am at the point where, perhaps because of the way inexplicable grief and pain sit rigidly somewhere in my head, and breathing is a tedious act, I indulge in most things that I believe hasten death.

One night in my third year in the university, largely inebriated from the binge-drinking that came with attending the official pageant of the school, I was accosted by two guys with one carrying a gun. One of my friends had come visiting that night and because it was late it was wise to see her off till she got a bus or bike. So while standing at the bus-stop, two guys walked towards us, and just immediately, as though they had rehearsed the moment, one of them brought out a gun, threatening to shoot us if we did not give them our phones and monies. It was an old black revolver with paper tape clasped firmly around nuzzle. Ideally, it made sense to immediately kneel and surrender everything we had to them. It was a wise thing to do in the case of such confrontation and would have saved us from any eventuality. But in that moment, there was not a single dose of fear in my mind. My friend had liquid fears streaming down her eyes. You could tell that she was terrified. It was the first time she saw a gun pointing to her face. That’s when I knew that I’d never let anyone get away with scaring another human being that way, reducing their personality to tears, jitters, and fears, so I concluded that the only way they could get anything off us was to kill me or shoot at my friend. Perhaps, seeing her in pain or dead would have softened my resolve and I probably would have let up. I groggily moved closer to the two of them, stared at them right in the face and said, “Bros, why we go give you our phone and money?” The guys were astounded. I was sure they were wondering why anyone would dare the sight of a gun and risk losing his life in a moment of fatal bravery. I didn’t put myself in a position of self-pity where I’d wonder what would happen if I died. I just knew that I wasn’t going to be helpless in that situation. And even if I did die, it would be on my own terms; fighting back against injustice. That night, after about 20 minutes of cajoling and threats and heavy voices, the only thing the guys got from us was the warm handshake I gave them when we settled while I was lucky to get a stick of cigarette from one of them.

When death stares at us coldly in the face, the natural reaction is to flee. As sensible as this admonition might seem, it however reinforces the age-long rubric that “cowards die a thousand times before their death.” The inconsistency of human intelligence that bugs me about death is this: if we all agree that we won’t get out of the world alive, and that predestination exists, why are we afraid to speak up against injustice? Why do we keep quiet in situations where opening our mouth to speak might be the only saving grace we have? Why are we afraid of losing our lives if we truly believe that we will die eventually, when the time is right? To me, this particular scenario of emotional detachment from perceived reality seems like a clear case of mismanagement of the “he who is down needs fear no fall” rubric that most humans, who live their lives without holding back in an attempt to suspend or avoid their own death, have come to cherish. I believe, like Vladimir Putin said, that “whoever is destined to be hanged won’t drown.”

I’ll die at 35. Or maybe I won’t. but that is not something within my mortal capabilities to alter. As such, I am regularly trying to live on my own terms; take each day, split it open, pour enough memories into it while chasing the next story in the eyes of people. More than a writer, I prefer to see myself as a collector of voices. Because, in the end, these voices, these memories, emotions, and experiences serve as lubricants to make departure easy. So, whether humans maintain a docile attitude to life, and decide to play by the books of normalcy, departure, or death, as it were, is something we will never be able to escape. Except, of course, if the earth spits us out as an expression of its anger against environmental despoliation. At best, our existence, even from birth, is a synopsis of departure. Because, even when we achieve everything humanly possible here, our lives are a continuous stream, antithetical and climatic, in the entire plot of death. Every speck and moment in our existence is a chapter in the book of death. Our life, as we see it, is really just an unfolding of our end.