Because the seers follow you across lifetimes.
I am dreaming, and in my dream, we are together again, Temisola- the girl I can no longer remember, you. There is no face. All that remains is a voice, scratchy, like a broken gramophone record, and a memory: a song, hazy, like it has been a long time since it has been played, regret. I still protect this. Like the other fragments of myself, hidden in this flotsam called my mind, it presents another piece to this puzzle- the riotous search for myself in the midst of fading memories. Someday perhaps they might become a whole, like this phase of the moon under which we played, and I might remember who I was, once. I might remember you.
Like every dream, I must wake up, in more ways than one, only now to the electric twinge in my spine- and to fear. The twinge was new, fear having since settled as an integral part of my consciousness, the quiet friend you had come to forget was there. It was the fear that saved you, the fear that made you you in this world that forbade hoping. It was the fear that held you back, that made sure you never had to feel this electric twinge in your spine. Because when you did, they would know. And when they knew, they would come.
I do not remember how this world began. We were not taught to know, never meant to know. We only knew that it was, in the same way one knew of the imprint of his own name- your only possession in a world that gave you none. It was not our way to ask, to dream of asking, dreams being what they were- an aberration, a glitch in the Anti-Christ Equation they had created to unify human thought as an answer to world peace. They had succeeded, banishing the impulses that had driven men to violence but at a cost. We forgot. Nothing remained of our memories of Before, of ourselves before we changed. I had forgotten how to dream; forgotten what it meant to think for myself, to exist- a wild card, outside of the horde. Till now- and for that, I had become a criminal in this world, as I was a witch in the Other World so long ago. And for that, I was always running.
Silence.
There is nothing to hear in this stillness, nothing save the blood in your ears and your own thoughts, colliding. There is nowhere else to go. How did one love in a world like ours, where we could not even recall tenderness, where your only friend was fear? How did you love the fragments of a memory, a person you had come to fear was fiction? I did not know but I held on still. I had become a slave to these things, an addict to memory. In a world that had moved on, I could not look away or forget.
Knocking. Wind. The sound of shouts outside.
I do not answer. I am thinking, dreaming, memorizing this self again before their supreme act of violation. They would break into my mind again. I would forget. Nothing would remain- not these memories of mine, not the fragments of my journey across lifetimes. Nothing but you Temisola- this husk of self, this ghost latching on to my psyche like the messy trail of a spirit child. Nothing would remain save this memory: me, looking at you, from that world from which we came, and a voice, yours. I would carry it to my grave.
There will always be those who bind us to this world.
Static
DreamRec. April the 24th. 2048.
Enter Log.
#
A long time ago, before our world began.
There will always be those who bind us to this world. We call them seers.
Temisola
You remember. You always remember, don’t you? The inevitable expanse of other lives- memory, the disconcerting awareness of history repeating itself before your eyes. This- the moment when you died, when your people realized you were never truly theirs but yet could not let you go. I do not blame them. How could they? You were a spirit child, yes, and the other world was sealed within your mind like a brand upon cowhide. You were not like the others, yes, who were made to forget, who the seers had driven into forgetting their home world. But you were the only child. You were the only one who stayed beyond your mother’s painful birth, crying and kicking for being born again. You were the only one who couldn’t leave, who Chukwu– Great One, Chief of all Creation, would not let you return home- to me.
No, you were not like them. They had learned to stay. You were not like me. I never left.
Long ago, a woman wanted children so she went to the sacred Boka tree. Night fell, when the spirits of little children came to play under light from the full moon and she called softly, to the little wind dancing in the trees that was the sound of children playing:
Mother Tree
Mother Tree
Give me a child
And then she waited.
We were there. We were there and we laughed- at her petition, at that queer mix of strength and pain we found so amusing in humans. Was this our crime? Did Chukwu look down from Elu-Igwe, His mysterious home in the skies, to find two spirits mocking man, the crown of His creation? Was this our penance- you, damned to go through their cycle of rebirths, unable to return, me, to wander the spirit world alone, unable to reach you outside your dreams?
I do not know. These things were past finding, even for a spirit. I only know that you laughed, and a moment later you were silent, listening to her song.
How would it feel to live a human life? This was the question you would ask later, softly, as your eyes looked towards the borders of the human world. Of course I didn’t know- I had never been a man. But I had heard the stories, stories of what it meant to be mortal- of suffering, of sickness, of death. I told them to you, but when your eyes got brighter instead of dull, and your skin did not go pale with fear, I should have known it was only a matter of time before you left me to seek the mortal world.
You left that very night, to that woman and her song, and even now I remember how the night took upon a shade: darker, like there was no moon in the sky, and a heaviness I could not name. Grief. Grief was a human thing, but I couldn’t stop myself, the same way I could not stop myself from running to the border between our worlds even when I knew you were already gone, searching perhaps, for a residue of you.
Grief. Grief was a human thing, but we carried it across lifetimes.
Asemoa
I am a child of both worlds. All children are, only that time passes and we forget, human life being what it is- a leaf, tossed about by the currents of the Earth so that when we remember, we are already old and our eyes are already set on going home.
When I was born, I cried for many days. All children do. We cried for the lost things, the memory, and the obligations that followed mortality. We cried for our fellows, who cried with us, waiting, on the other side of time, for the few who could return. I cried for my twin, Temisola, who I had left to pursue the wonders of the human world.
Only a few knew this, why all children greeted this world with tears, and it was this few that would damn us in the years to come.
Seers. Emissaries of mankind to the Great One Chukwu, Father of All Spirits. They were the ones who saw, who felt the ripple of the veils that kept apart their world and ours. They were the ones who knew, who left in their wake the leash that bound all spirits to the Earth: old age, and the trappings of mortality. Frightened mothers would run to them when a child refused to stay, when a child came again, known, by the marks of another life. One look by a seer and a spirit would spill our secrets, confessing where we hid our deepest treasures, our iyi-uwa, our link to the world beyond. We would forget. Nothing would remain of who we were or the world we left behind.
Not me. I could not forget, not Temisola- whose name resonated within me the sound of ancient memories, not the spirit world, to which I was inextricably bound. Sometimes they crossed this world and theirs, and I would see my brothers- they were waiting for me, on the other side of time. They did not smile any more- I was a spirit touched with the human world now, I was an Ancestor. Someday I will die and my body will return to the Earth from which it came, the last, in a long series of rebirths. I would remain, spirit but changed, made sacred by the very world which held me bound, by the very weight of her memories. I will no longer be the same.
I wonder now. Would she still remember me?
I look at my mother and my mother knows. She looks at me with the tears she does not shed anymore. What did the seer tell her?
“You are not meant for this world”, she says with a sorrowful shake of her head. I do not reply to her. There was nothing I could say. What did she know of the lines that bound all spirits, the ancient longings planted in our blood eons ago by Chukwu Himself? What did she know of her, my twin, bound to me since the dawn of our creation, drawn to me in spirit as I was drawn to her in flesh? Only death could separate us, and we were spirit. We could not die. Only death could bring me home.
You mortals call it love. If only you knew. Love itself is spirit.
Still, there were little mercies. I came to love this world, in my way. Life was an adventure under the fear of dying- you found life or death or nothing at every end of the bend. I remember the first time I cut myself, the look I gave the growing red puddle at my feet, puzzled. My mother screamed, and a hotness flared up my leg for which I had no name then. Pain. I Iay indoors, flitting between light and dark for weeks, my spirit brethren waiting, but I had never felt so alive.
Another time, I came upon a snake wound tightly round itself. It was a hot day, and the snake was warming itself by the bushes near our home. It must have been very weak because it didn’t sense my presence, and when I gently touched its brilliant, ringed black coils, there was no sound, not a ripple to be heard. Something about its posture spoke to me–of the circle of rebirth, of sunset and sunrise, of the world moving round and round till it came to itself, and I might have continued there brooding to my death had my father not shoved me away just before the snake poised to strike. He was livid.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?!” he had shouted. His face was a mask of anger and relief, and fear.
I could not answer. How did you tell your father you had actually forgotten that you could die?
Mortality. Mortality hung over us like a knife on an edge, a grim cloud. A man was born to the knowledge of his death, and his entire life balanced on that spider web. There were no certainties. An old man longed for the afterlife. A child just died. You walked through paths that were unfamiliar, even though you knew they were there: good and evil and death. You lived for the moment, wherever it was. And so they loved, and died. They threw their parties, and they died. They lived wickedly, and died. And it was these moments they had, this belief in meaning, that made them who they were. Man. They knew what things were valued because they knew what things were lost.
We are spirit, and we are wise, but this was something we had never learned. There are some things you could not learn without dying.
I do not know when I finally decided to stay. I do not even know why. Maybe it was my mother and her pleas, this woman I had tormented for many years, who had met seer upon seer in vain. Maybe it was me, I had not had enough of the human world.
It didn’t matter. I was letting go of the world I left behind and I felt that world slacken, the bond growing thinner with the times. I would not see my spirit brothers again for many years and by the time I did, I was already an old man, with a wife long gone, and my weary eyes waiting for the afterlife- or if Chukwu wished, another rebirth. It did not matter, not any more.
#
Perhaps, we never truly forget
29th October, 2010.
The Present.
Somewhere, in between dreaming and waking, I see her again- Temisola. We are under the Boka tree and we are laughing, our voices wild and free, by the light of a full moon. We are not alone. There is a woman too, and this woman is singing. Her voice is beautiful and haunting, calling to me in its terrible depth. My mother, from a long time ago.
A moment later and there is silence. I feel Temisola staring at me.
“I did not forget you, Temisola”, I try to say but the words catch in my throat and I do not say them. I do not even try to meet her eyes.
I woke up. There is no one here, just the steady sound of rain and the noisy ceiling fan. My wife is out, probably on an early morning shift, but the air still holds faint traces of her cologne, a smell I have come to associate with home. This should be comforting, but I do not even acknowledge it.
I have not dreamt of you for many years, Temisola. Why now? I ask this of the empty room.
There is no answer, but the wind blows suddenly from an open window, filling the room with my wife’s cologne. Almost as if, to blow the thought away.
I do not dream of her again, but I see her everywhere now- her eyes, in a colleague at work, her voice, in a storekeeper. Once my wife was talking and I just sat there, listening. I could have sworn that we have had this talk before, once, in a previous life.
“You remind me of someone”, I said to her.
“Who?”
I smiled but did not say.
The world had changed much since the world I left behind- walking through this world had become a journey through history. I was here, thirty years ago, when it was just a bush path, and it was there I suffered a particularly violent death. It had become a burden, these memories, this weight of other lives. I was living in the present, yet haunted by the past.
Once, a lifetime ago, I could not bear it any more so I told my mother.
“I cannot forget, Mummy,” I said.
“Forget what?” she asked.
“My former life.”
She had laughed it off. In that life, people had to begin to forget. In this life, they had all but forgotten.
There is no one I can tell now. I am the last of my kind.
I have learnt to hide them, these memories, and all the knowledge that came with it. Where once they saw the ogbanje, an abiku, now they saw a man burdened with the weight of years. An old soul, they call me. If only they knew. If only they remembered.
Still, there were always those who knew, at some level. They were drawn to you, and did not know why. Like my wife, Oma. I had met her at a friend’s party and had told her to marry me. She had laughed, and we spent the rest of the party talking to each other. She had left without leaving a contact, but I was unworried. She was my wife in a previous life. We met two weeks later in a library and a few months later, we were married. We have been married for eight years, and there is no one alive who could read me as well as she does. No one but this woman from my past, Temisola, who, for some reason, had chosen to haunt my present like a ghost–the only relic of my past that had any substance. But for what purpose? Vengeance? Love? Was this Your sign, Chukwu, asking me to return to the spirit world?
What would I tell you, Temisola?
I was a man now used to knowledge. Still, I could not answer this. I almost laughed. This was how Chukwu laughed at us.
Deep in my thoughts, I do not hear a car speed by in the worst of the rain. I do not register the sound, mud splattering, until the gritty feeling on my face and clothes. I pause. I am livid.
A woman alights from the car and in my shock, I do not hear her spirited apologies. She is very dark, and her looks are not one you would easily forget. I couldn’t. Hers was the constant of every memory, the one person I had searched for in others for a lifetime.
“Temisola?”
She pauses her explanations and looks me in the eye for the first time. Her face is blank, with one eyebrow raised in a question.
She does not remember me.
Mayor Prosper Ihechi writes stories for the voices in his head, and poetry for his soul. Through words, he reenacts the miracle of flight.
