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Ope Adedeji

I
She quotes Warsan Shire saying, I cannot make homes out of human beings. She is chopping vegetables on a new chopping board I have just purchased from the market. She likes old things and is reluctant to dispose the old chopping board. The kitchen smells of our childhood, like the sweet grief of earth on rainy days, of Alligator Plants, of Aloe Vera, and lizards. I am standing against a cabinet facing the window, watching the sun’s ripples consume the day, nostalgic for simpler days.

In our movements and the sounds we make, we follow the rhythm of the florescent bulb buzzing as it fluctuates. I catch a glimpse of tears slipping down her face. Without looking up, she tells me that it is because of the onions she has just finished slicing. I am drinking straight from a bottle of Ruby Port. When the wine is halfway, she faces me, her eyes are red and swollen. I lick my lips — licking away my lipstick and savouring the thick syrupy berry notes of the wine. Being a light-weight does not stop me from drinking fast — from taking uncharacteristic and inelegant large gulps. I am tipsy already. She shrugs, her shoulders falling, almost sinking. She bites her lips, as if in contemplation. Then she says, with some sort of finality that I cannot make home out of human beings. I want to ask her what home is. I want to tell her that I have made homes out of human beings, that it is how I exist. She shakes her head, the corners of her lips curl downwards and her eyes squint. She is hugging herself from an outburst. I do not know how to help her. I do not know how to help myself.

II
I am sitting on my bed, in a room I share with four strangers who are noisy. They are talking about a girl rumoured to have gotten raped on campus. They are saying the girl wore short skirts a lot and must have brought it upon herself. “She caused it,” the dark one with the gap teeth says “Why must she wear bum shorts and skirts as short as her bum, around campus?” The timbre at the edge of their voices reverberates through the four dim gray walls of our small room. I try to interject with my opinion that her dressing had nothing to do with it, but they ignore me. When they start talking about a guy who broke up with his girlfriend at our cocktail party the night before, I think that their gossip is sweet. It is sweeter when they transition into Yoruba, like soft sweet potatoes dipped in gravy on my tongue. There is laughter. I laugh with them. My laughter is sonorous and fits in places where theirs pauses and ends. It is music and magic at once. The sound of our laughter floats through the roof of our room and sits somewhere with the clouds. This is one of my good days, when I do not think of what happened a few months ago. But even the good days are not completely good — they are a sting in the tail, with me teetering on the edge of sanity and insanity, a really thin line. Other good days are days in the arms of my lover, at the beach or in the house, drinking wine, watching the sunset, teasing each other, holding hands. There are terrible days as well, days that start off with lonely nights when I cling to my duvet and look at the screen of my phone with naked people touching each other in ways I could never have anyone touch me. My soul is not in me, neither is my body. The emptiness is not one that music, noise or laughter easily fills. I am a ghost wandering through empty rooms. The acrid taste of melancholy sits on my tongue. I have no sense of home, no sense of time, no sense of belonging, no sense of hope. I just am.

III
But now I understand what she means when she tries to convince me that I cannot make homes out of human beings. That conversation transpired months before the catastrophe but it comes to me often. I recognise it as an out of body experience. I was speaking to myself or to the version of myself that comprehended the truth. Yet, I continued to breathe into my peoples’ necks and feel their warmth between my thighs. I built castles with the bodies of my lovers, learning secrets about nooks even they did not know. Their faces were colourful with smiles that became brighter when they saw me. Their fragrances, ranging from aftershave to coconut oil and shea butter, struck chords in me. I was sure they were home, that the folds in their stomach, their love handles, the scars on their legs, and the moles on their skin told stories and secrets homes can only tell their owners.

I remember K now as I type. I vaguely remember his face because it is one of the things that I tried to burn when I lost him. I remember that it is rough and coarse but that I liked touching it, liked that they felt like sand in my hands. I hated his eyes. They just never stayed. They danced around mine as if trying to figure me out. I like things that stayed. I like beautiful eyes like the eyes of the woman I now call my own. They are a garden growing only daffodils, bright and golden. They stay, loving and breathing fire, not chaotic, as K’s were. But like most things, I learned to adjust. I learned to not focus on his eyes. Instead, I focused on his soft hands and slid mine into them. I found warmth in them. I found home in the weight of his body on mine, in that intimacy where breathing is almost impossible. Like several other lovers, he was home to me.

IV
In December last year, a man came and took my body in ways I could not understand. This was the beginning of the catastrophe that almost made me mad. I had met him at a bar a couple of blocks from campus when my friends and I went drinking. He was charming with eyes that constantly smiled at their edges. He had kissed my cheeks — in a manner that seemed out of a Victorian era novel, and I had felt flattered, my feet dancing like butterfly wings.

When it happens, I breathe into my palms and rub my neck, staring into nothing. I see space: an emptiness without colours, a vacuum with chaos. I get out of his bed, put on my trousers and head out of his house. I hear him calling out for, someone — likely me — since it is my name. But I refuse to look back at him or to reply, because it is not me, my name is no longer my name. My legs are moving of their will. There are yellow cabs outside his house. One old man in a green agbada asks where I am going. Law school, I say, barely opening my mouth, my eyes concentrating on the dirt stains on his white cap. In the cab, my hands shake, my lips tremble. The cab man asks if I am okay. I do not answer. I do not remember paying him or climbing up the stairs to my room, or much else, but I am in bed, my hands are between my thighs. My tongue tastes of metal, of his lips and tongue, slithering forcefully into mine.

I am in the shower. Time runs like the water pouring out of the shower, fast, cold but not shocking. I pay special attention to washing my vagina but avoid thinking of it and the sour feeling sprouting from it up to my chest and into my rapid beating heart. Someone wakes me up in the middle of the night to study, and I laugh. My thick out-of-belly, laughter, escapes my lips, and runs out of the room, afraid of me. I drop dead again.

My best friend comes to see me with bread and wine. We sit in his car in the parking lot in front of campus. I do not say much. I just stuff the bread into my mouth and drink the wine through a black and red Nescafe bottle. No one knows that something is wrong, that I am not with my body, that my name is not mine. I dream of telling my mother, of crying into her thighs, being comforted by her lavender fragrance but I also dream of her screaming at me, blaming me, burning all my clothes, taking me to church for deliverance. I prefer the silence to eat me up than listen to her or my roommates or anyone; blame me for what has happened. Even though I blame myself.

I smile instead, and when I smile, seeds develop under the wing of my ribcage, growing into a full plant that surges round my throat, choking me. I think I am dying.

V
Two weeks later, he texts me to come over. I tell him I am not having sex with him. He sends three laughter emojis and replies, Who plans to have sex anyway? I leave for his house in a cab he sends over. When I get there, I sit at the edge of the threadbare brown settee and he sits on the bed. I do not know why I am here. Why are you here, Ope? She answers that she is looking for her body, that she wants it back. There is resentment inside her voice. I hide my face in my phone while he talks to me about things like boys and women and food. He offers me Baileys and I turn it down. The sun is thick in my throat and when I laugh, it comes out like I am trying to cough it out. If he notices anything different about my laughter, he does not tell me. He tells me I am beautiful, that he has missed my beautiful eyes. I smile a one sided smile, raising my head to catch his eyes.

It is there in his eyes, the hunger. It is hollow, suggestive. He has taken off his shirt and I have laced up my sneakers, ready to leave. Stay a while, he tells me. He is close even though I did not see him move. He smells of cigarette and tangerines. I close my eyes, afraid, asking Ope again, why I am here. She answers that she does not know. Her voice is shaking. When he kisses my cheeks, I tell him that I am not in the mood. I already told you I do not want to have sex, I say, shifting, almost falling off the settee. I do not want to have sex with you, I say, still staring at my phone. He offers to hold me. I shake my head. He insists. I sigh. I lay in his embrace, my hands tracing tiny hairs on his belly. I am tentative and at once miserable. My eyes are static on the white ceiling, concentrating on a brown patch spread like a map, very deliberate and artistic, I think. I know my body is no longer here, no longer in his house or with him and I tell Ope this. She shrugs. He pushes me down to the floor. It is covered with a red rug that smells damp or of shoes. He tries then, to steal my soul. He is heavy but I do not stop trying to push him off. He is whispering for me to calm down, “You’ll like this,” he says. With my eyes closed, I bite into my hands, hurting myself and cursing my legs for leaving my room.

Heaven watches and does nothing.

These men, I later think walking to campus, would never stop at your body, they want all of you, the crown of your head, and the sole of your feet. They want you, the mysteries you are moulded with, your soul, your silent resilient spirit, the arch of your body. They will not stop until you are stripped of all you have, until you are vulnerable and cold, until you are dust. Only then, will they leave you to find their next victim.

VI
There are pretty weird places to find yourself and reclaim your body but nobody will tell you this. Television adverts tell you about evening you skin tone, and your mother talks about sitting like a lady, but no one will tell you that if they steal your body, it is not your fault. No one tells you that your vagina is yours. These are things my mother did not tell me, because her mother did not tell her. These are things I learn myself.

On a Thursday morning in April when I am alone in my room, sitting on my bed opposite the window, looking out at the delicate white foam on the sky, breathing fast, god walks in. The sun floods the room, a presence that cannot be moved. It is hot, but there are goose bumps on my skin and I am shivering, my teeth clinking into each other. I see god and I recognize her as me. She watches me with sad eyes and a small smile. I look at my skin, how my experiences few months ago made me shed them layer after layer. The starvation was what I needed, to punish myself, to teach myself a lesson. I run my hands around my skin, tracing the veins on my wrists and fingering the birth marks on my thighs.

My legs are wide apart, my face bent forward, my stomach tucked in. My fingers spread the lips of my vagina apart and my eyes curiously peer in. It is a glorious work of pink and brown, soft and warm, the face of heaven. God must have paid attention to the intricate details of my womanhood, crafting it with an eye to the little details. I can hear my body singing hallelujah, absolving itself of the conviction I placed over it. There are so many mysteries I know not of: the memory of time, my body, my name. I am thinking then, that there is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding vaginas, that we were young when we were taught that vagina is a dirty bad word, so we said Toto, that we must not let anyone see or touch us down there unless we become messed up girlies. We were taught so much but In that moment, all I see when I stare is light. Satisfied, I look up to god, she is gone. I sigh my orgasm sigh.

A few months later, my body will return to me in baby steps and I will find home in it.

About the author: Ope Adedeji dreams about a lot of things but most especially about bridging the gender equality gap and working with the United Nations. If you do not find her writing, you would find her reading a novel.