Honorable Mention for the 2022 Contest in Prose. Read judge Amina Cain’s blurb here.
How to Catch Cherry Blossoms
I am not a well-balanced man. I am sick. I know I am sick. Not the kind of sickness you might think, not the kind you can ease with drugs, not the kind that poisons your blood and rots your bones. I have come to understand that when people say they are sick, this is what they normally mean. I do not have that problem often. Maybe worms once in two years but apart from that, I am a consistently healthy human being. The sickness I suffer from is more serious, more debilitating.
I make excuses for it. I think of my life, and the turbulence it has weathered. If I make an effort, I can think up rational excuses for myself. But what do those matter? What does it matter to a dead plant, that its owner never watered it? It has failed still–in the grand scheme of things.
It follows me, this knowledge, embellishes every word I speak, every sentence I make. I bear it like a weight on my chest. Gently. Gently. Gently.
—
I am sick. But the boy is a pure chalice, so pure that I am afraid I cannot love him. Because I am not sure I am capable of love. I don’t remember how these things work.
The first thing that draws me to him are cherry blossoms. Tiny, pink, yellow, white, flowers that fall like snow, that bloom like a thousand births, like life finding meaning. I find them in a class WhatsApp group. It is early 2016. The assistant class prefect posts a picture of them.
Happy Birthday, Lenin, she says.
Others say the same thing.
Happy Birthday, Vic. The Original V.I. Lenin.
Normally, I do not engage in pleasantries like these. It is always somebody’s birthday, and I do not remember how to feel happy about people’s birthdays.
Everyone marvels at his picture. They are so excited about it. Someone sends him a voice note singing the Birthday song, such an accursed song.
I have seen him before in class. His name is Onuorah Victor. But the picture makes me notice him for the first time. Notice his small ears and beady light-brown eyes. His stubby fingers and the dimples crested on his chubby cheeks. I have never seen a picture that flawless, that quaint. In it, Onuorah Victor is staring smilingly at something off-frame. All around him, there are falling cherry blossoms caught in mid-air, like they were drawn there by God himself. He is like a centerpiece set in a collage of perfection, like every part of the picture, every pixel, every reflection, has been carefully debated and decided. I am fascinated by this sturdy giant tree behind him crowned with pink and white flames. I stare at the tree for so long a time that I later dream about it, its tiny fruits clustered and purplish.
I message him.
Where is this? I ask. The tree behind you, what is it called?
It’s a cherry, he replies. And that was in Canada. 2014.
It’s beautiful, I say.
And he sends me a voice note describing what it felt like to have all those flowers falling around him. They fall slowly, he says. Slowly, slowly. Like gentle spirits.
There is something so innocent about him, so childlike, something beautiful.
The next day in class, he stops next to me. He sits on my desk, his legs swinging back and forth, and talks about the cherry trees in British Columbia.
***
I am a man of many flaws. Bitter. Joyless. Hateful. I have been called all these and for good reason. Some have gone as far as to say that I can no longer laugh or feel emotions.
I destroy things I touch, burn whatever comes close. My friends say I can’t help it, that I am disturbed. But I disagree. I do not destroy good things by mistake. Good things fizzle into death eventually and so, sometimes, I kill them to save myself the trouble.
I am insufferable. It is, however, not true that I do not laugh. Or that I do not know how to feel emotions. I laugh. I cry. I fume. I am just like everyone else in that respect. The only difference is that I do not feel the obligation to perform happiness or sorrow. I will not cry if a classmate announces the death of their father in class, I will not feign sympathy for people I despise. And the truth is, I hate many people. Hate was not always something that came easily to me. They say it is circumstance that bends the crayfish. I hate myself too, I think. It is hard to say because I rarely think about myself and when I do, it is mostly with pity. Pity is the one emotion I easily allow myself. It is the one thing I know no one can say I don’t deserve.
But I do not hate Onuorah Victor. He is like a lamb. Or a child, an angry baby. Or a puppy. You get the gist. Something so aggressively defenseless and pure that it compels care.
—
He too is marked by grief. I can tell. I can always tell things like that. I ask him about it, about his family, and he mentions a father and a mother and brothers and a sister. He does not mention grief.
I am always trying to hear people’s grief, to not be alone. The deeper the grief, the better I feel. I know this is a broken thing to do, but I am a broken man after all.
When I tell him about my mother, tell him life is meaningless without her, he tries to reassure me that things will get better. I think of explaining that this is impossible, and that I do not even want that. But my fear holds me back. I do not want him to see me the way everyone else does. I chew my explanation in my mouth. Something about the crayfish and how it is crushed by the weight of its pitiful life, so much so that it literally bends in surrender.
Everyone loves joy, both as an emotion and as a way of being. They want to feel joy, always. When they are sad, the goal is to stop being sad. So there is no way for me to explain my surrender to loss, no words with which to articulate that this grief is the only thing I have left of her, and that it is the only thing that has stopped me from considering death. On the other side, there is nothingness and I don’t want that. I want pain. I want loss. I want grief, eternal and complete.
***
I dream of a Sunday afternoon. A happy one. I dream of my mother in the kitchen of a house that smells of chicken stew. The details are not very clear because it is a dream that has lost the force of conviction. I imagine no one dreams of an uneventful family meal unless they are dreaming of death. Memory helps me fill the blanks: my mother’s brown hairnet, a big green sieve for the rice, the hole on the handle of the stirring spoon, unimportant things in the grand scheme of things.
We are having chicken stew because it is my birthday, or at least the first Sunday after it. After making the rice, she makes coleslaw. I hate salad. I hate the mayonnaise and the cabbage, and the baked beans and carrots are on thin ice too. She keeps some sweetcorn for me because I enjoy that. Sometimes she forgets and mixes all the sweetcorn into the salad bowl, but most times she remembers.
Other times I dream of her sitting across from me at our shop in Mayor Market, gisting without abandon. Or of us going home together, standing at the Amaechi bus stop, in a sea of other pedestrians waiting to ebb ourselves into a Keke as soon as it stops. Even in those dreams, there is a sense of intangibility. Because I know it is a dream and that soon, I will be dragged into a reality in which I can barely remember her voice.
***
When my friends ask me what his deal is, I tell them Onuorah Victor and I are just friends. I tell them I don't even like him like that. He is too naive, too trusting, and too ideological. They look at me judgmentally, like they are certain I would hurt him.
I cannot blame them. He is nothing like any of the men I have been with before. And this is saying a lot because I have been with so many men, most of them deserving of my spite.
The last one, Chidiomimi (he asked me to call him Diddy and I told him I would not), was always telling me, I ma na I bughi ezigbo mmadu? You’re not a good person, you. I will always tell you to your face, even if you don’t want to hear it.
In my defense, he wasn’t such a saint himself. We were always fighting. In my lodge, it would be a quiet tussle that ended with us having sex. At his place, it went further than that, my rage burbling out my throat in tears. That, too, ended in sex because that was what held us together, that was why I stayed, knowing that I could always have that release and that he wanted me, even if only in those moments. I was used to it anyway. All the men I’ve been with are replicas of each other. My mother used to warn me about them, used to tell me they were dangerous, evil, wicked. She used all the bad words possible. In a way, she was right. But I am wicked too.
—
I try, however, to be kind to Onuorah Victor. I swallow my comments, reconsider and rearrange them, so careful not to upset him. I take notice of the things he likes, the books he likes, the people he likes. Assata Shakur. Fidel Castro. Kwame Nkrumah. Sankara. Cabral. I compliment his tie. I tell him it is a good color, that I love that color. It is my favourite color. I don’t have a favourite color so it is only half a lie.
When finally, he tells me of his father, I say nothing bad. He does not like his father but even then I am afraid of saying the wrong thing, of going too far. He tells me many horrifying stories about his family and I wonder if that was the aura of grief I saw around him. It had to be. He tells me of being locked outside and left to sleep on the cold concrete pavement, and of being left behind one holiday back in 2012 for not coming first in class, and about starvation and righteous judgment.
I used to be much more fatter as a child, he says to me. His voice is flat. I don’t know if he meant to say this with sadness or with victory.
All I know is that a child whose parents gave only one small meal per day until stretch marks began to appear on his shoulders was one who was bent too, in his own many ways.
I tell him he isn't fat at all. I compliment the straightness of his jaw.
But he protests this. Mba, guy, he says, Don’t patronize me. Being fat isn’t some kind of moral failure.
It is hard to tell if he believes himself. I hug him, and hold him. I tell him to remove his cardigan and when he does, I poke his stomach and tell him he's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
—
When he lets me, I kiss him, slide my hands beneath his shirt to nestle my hand in his warmth. I am intoxicated by the muskiness of what lies concealed underneath his yellow and polka dot underwear. When he doesn’t want to be touched—and this happens many times—I simply lie next to him. We listen to his favorite artists. Indie artists who I would otherwise not tolerate. Bon Iver. The Strokes. The Smiths.
When I can no longer contain the storms in my head, I go to the bathroom and rub myself to completion.
We trade scars, he speaks of his mother making him eat a separate dish from the rest of the family because he was putting on too much weight. And of his elder brothers taking him jogging but not running at a pace he could keep up with. And of the day he got lost in Trans-Ekulu, wandering and wandering, a 13-year-old boy, hungry and dying for sleep. And of his sister telling him that maybe he should start wearing bras. And his father asking him to imagine how he’d get away if he had to run for his life.
I tell him of my mother's long battle with cancer. Battle. I always found that word strange for a disease like cancer. It made it seem so insurmountable, because how could one ever battle their own body and win. I tell him how I cried each time I visited her at the hospital because I did not believe she would win, and how I have shouldered the guilt of those thoughts. I tell him of the afternoon I sat crying in front of her bed, confessing my deepest darkest secret because I thought that that was what was killing her, that God was punishing me by making her suffer.
***
In class, Onouarah Victor is everyone’s favorite. He is the guy that has not only read the textbook but has annotated it with his own thoughts. I borrow his books sometimes and I read the notes at the margins of the paper. His thoughts on imperialism, on capitalism, on development, on global financial institutions, on everything.
I don’t feel much about any of those. I try to get a deeper understanding of them so that when he talks of them I am not lost.
He says the most outrageous things but everyone respects it, because if it is from Lenin, then it must be grounded in reason. One day he stands in front of the whole class and says, The International Monetary Fund should be abolished, and no one thinks this unacceptable. Even the lecturer nods and then says, Why do you hold that view? Care to explain?
I am extremely envious of how much he is loved, but there is this clarity with which he explains himself. Sometimes I record his voice, explaining the revolutions in Ghana or Burkina Faso or Vietnam. Or a movement in Latin America. And I listen to them over and over till they are almost committed to my memory. Within it, there is so much moral conviction. But I am afraid that it is from a place of hurt. I ask him about it.
How are you a communist when your parents are super-rich?
And he laughs. Do you think it’s morally justifiable that my father has so much money that he has houses in different countries that he uses for vacation? Houses that sit empty most of the year? Whereas your mother couldn’t get all the surgeries she needed to have a fighting chance? They just left her there to die.
I stare at him, unsure how to feel that he would use my mother’s death like that, as an argument.
I didn’t mean it like that, he begins to say.
No, it's fine. You made your point.
No, really. I am so sorry. What happened to her was horrendous.
He says that a lot. Horrendous. Unconscionable. A moral outrage. Abhorrent. Words like that. I care about my father’s wealth, he says. But only to the extent that I see it as a sign of gross injustice. I could never be happy living like that. No one should be. He ends with a quote, from Fidel Castro, I think. He recites it the way we used to recite nursery rhymes, the words tumbling out like a well-rehearsed song: Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.
—
Still, when I meet his parents, I am overcome by the need to please, to leave a lasting positive impression. I feel so small standing next to their regal statures. I feel embarrassed by their controlled manner of speaking, by the expansiveness of their living room in their colonial-era duplex in Trans-Ekulu. I try to keep my face expressionless, like I have seen this all before. They are kind to me. They offer me drinks and chin-chin and make small conversation, and it makes me wonder how people like that could be so cruel to their own son. Later, when he asks me what I think of his parents, I shrug and say they are okay. He prods, but I know I cannot give him an answer he will like. I kiss him, gently so he has the time to decide if he wants to be kissed.
I don’t know what to think about them, I say. Whatever you tell me to think I will think.
And we lie in his bed, my hand around his shoulder.
The thing with cherry blossoms, as with all flowers, is that all they crave is the security of nourishment, the tenderness of sunshine.
—
In the morning, I sit with him on the balcony and listen to him speak of his childhood. Of the abandoned white limousine packed at the end of the street, its tires gone. The landscaped terrace where he played tag and football with his brothers and other boys that lived in the estate. The tiled pavement before their front door. It used to be bare concrete. It was on that concrete that he spent a night the day he found out he came second in class.
He tries to explain. He tells me how intelligent his elder brothers are and how exceptional his younger sister is. He tells me how he had so many subjects back then, and how he used to have excruciating headaches because he was always hungry.
You're the most intelligent guy I know, I tell him.
You should meet my siblings, he says chuckling.
He reclines on his seat and places his feet on my thighs. I stare at them, at their pale smoothness, at the contours of his heels and the slenderness of his toes. Taking them in my palms, I begin to massage them softly. He closes his eyes.
I stare at the serenity on his relaxed face and admit to myself, for the first time, that I am in love with him.
***
I dream of this place, this room, this bed. Of Onuorah Victor, sitting at his table, the light from the window glorious on his skin.
We are arguing about nothing, about darkness, about space.
He is saying how none of those are measurable quantities.
Immeasurable darkness is a tautology, he says. Darkness already is immeasurable.
I drift from there. Now we are both cradling books in our hands. He is reading Beyond Diplomacy and I am reading something on Comparative Politics. We are just there, in each other’s space, and my heart is beating because something about this is so foreign, so fleeting. I know I am dreaming but I am not sure this exists outside of this dream.
He brings out his charger and plugs his phone and then drops it on his lap. The folds in his jersey shorts run all along his thighs, like linen in a renaissance-era painting. His eyes move slowly from left to right following the letterings in the textbook. He is reading out the words but I cannot make out what he is saying.
I love you, I say under my breath knowing he won't hear me.
—
I dream of love. Of my past, back when my mother was alive. Back when my brothers and I badgered her until she agreed to cook this or that food. Back when I stayed up late into the night on MTN midnight calls, a man telling me my skin was a canvas on which he saw his own reflection. I feel his love again. Because these dreams are fantasies where I go to see things that no longer exist, or that never existed. I see myself in his room, on his bed, naked, barely a teenager. I see the way his friends look at me and whisper to themselves, and the way he teases me after he grunts himself to exhaustion.
Spoilt child. You are a spoilt child.
I dream of the nights I cry myself to sleep, ashamed and disgusted by my own body, wishing he would speak to me in his room the way he spoke to me on the phone.
I dream of God, my mother, and the collapsed part of her right breast that a doctor thought so corrupted that he had to cut it off.
—
I dream of the afternoon in March when the police force me into a black Hilux and my mother’s ghost sits in the back with me.
I didn’t do anything, I keep saying. But they already have their confirmation from the 2go chat history of another detainee, his name is Henry. They put me in a cell with other men so disgusted with me that they hit me until I feel the bones in my jaws come loose, till my tears cake into the cuts on my skin.
Someone comes for Henry, the same day, before his wife gets the chance to suspect something. They come with baskets of money to sacrifice to the black Hilux. But my mother’s blood is not worthy enough to save me. I miss my SS2 final exams. My father borrows and borrows and offers his own basket in sacrifice. There is barely anything inside it. He pleads for my freedom. He weeps.
Please, he is just a child, He says to the Hilux. Can’t you see?
***
Onuorah Victor cares about Development and AFRICOM and the US military bases in Somalia and Niger and Kenya and Cameroon. He has authors he loves, and others that he hates passionately. He summarizes his thoughts on the blank pages of their books.
A pseudointellectual rationalization of imperialist violence in Latin America.
A white supremacist argument against the sovereignty of North Africans.
The new woke argument for the Structural Adjustment Program.
I could never be invested that much in anything, could never lose myself in something that unreservedly. I pretend, because it is important to him that I care, that I share his anger, that I understand the urgency of his faith. But he sees through this, sees that I do not have enough to give.
He speaks and speaks and then he waits to hear my voice. I offer it, but it rings hollow, without the intimacy of devotion. He does not voice his disappointment but I notice the slightest slump in his face.
The others in our class, they cheer for him. When he stands, eyes lit, the attention of a lecturer trapped in the small curve of his lips, they shout Lenin! The one and only V.I. Lenin! But at other times, they whisper about the two of us.
They're always together. Husband and wife.
We laugh about it, Onuorah Victor and I. He jokes about telling them, just to jar them but I know he craves their admiration more than he would ever admit to himself.
I am okay coming second. I am okay watching them love him and holding back the bile in my mouth. I want to tell them. I want to destroy his image so that only I can love him. Like I said, I am a broken man. But he is my redemption. For him, I gather the worst parts of me and bury them as deep as I possibly can.
It is his birthday again and some of them get him gifts. He is all smiles, all glow. He tells them he rarely ever celebrates his birthday and someone says, Let me guess. Birthdays are bourgeois. And he laughs so ardently, laughs with his entire body, his arms shaking with amusement. And I simply wait my turn, for when I have him to myself.
Back in his room, he asks for a dance and though I am too self-conscious to enjoy dancing, we dance. I move with him, our bodies trying to find sync. He seems happy, like a child who has had an entire day of pleasure rides and junk food. He leans into me, brushes his lips against mine and then puts his head on my shoulder. I hug him, kiss his temple and tell him, finally, that I love him. More than I have ever loved anything in my life, more than I ever thought it possible to love anything again. And he disentangles himself from my arms so fast that I stagger backwards. We stare at each other and I see that the light in his eyes is gone.
***
Those words create a fissure between us. He becomes cold, distant, making excuses to ignore me. Rational excuses so I cannot possibly find fault with them. On our way to school and back, he cultivates silence. And as soon as we arrive at the lodge, he seeks the solitude of his own room. Sometimes in class, he sits with me but even then, I do not feel like he is there, fully there, with me. At night, I lie on my back staring at my ceiling, nursing this panicked helpless feeling in the pit of my stomach. On his birthday he had looked at me like I was diseased, contagious. Like I had done something horrible to him.
What did you say? He asked.
And all I could do was stare, scared out of my mind.
Let me guess, I said chuckling. Love is bourgeois.
But he did not laugh.
There are moments when everything seems normal. Brief instances when I think maybe we are fine. Maybe it is just my fear, the rattling pieces of my heart dealing with the fact that he did not say it back, that he did not tell me he loves me too.
Now we are sitting on the bench beneath the trees and he is talking of home. His sister called the day before, he says. His father is ill. Hypertension. He laughs and leans into me.
Can you believe it? Hypertension?
It is the first time I feel close to him in a long time. I tell him his father will be fine. It seems the only logical thing to say at that moment.
I don’t really care, he laughs.
We go to the hospital together. I sit outside his father’s room while he goes in. I sit there for hours, thinking of my mother lying in a public ward, dying. When Onuorah Victor comes back out, he looks drained. He walks slowly up to me and puts his arms around me. I hold him tightly. I hold him like it might be my last chance.
—
There are times I wonder how different things would be if I had not said those words. Times I wonder if he would still hug me and let me lay my head on his bare stomach. If he would still laugh into my ears and smile at me in class, our eyes in secret communion. If there would be something where there now was emptiness.
—
It is a Friday evening and we are in his room. We are reading but my mind is not at ease. I try to make conversation but his head remains buried in a book. Normally he makes a sound to reassure me that he heard me. But today he says nothing. I sit there, staring at the page. When the sun sets far behind the hills of Agbani, he closes his book.
It’s getting really late, he says, shuffling his feet towards the door. He stands outside and I pack my books and say goodbye. I hold back the tears until I am back in the safety of my room.
I want to say something but I don't know what. I want to stop the darkness swimming between us. I want to go back to that day and take back my words, to wedge the door to that room with my body so that he doesn't leave, so that the darkness between us doesn't get the space to grow. My desperation builds and builds and builds.
Eventually, I break. It is a Sunday. I knock on his door and I beg him. I tell him it was only a mistake, a slip of tongue.
I don't love you, I say, hiccupping, my chest heaving up and down like I am running out of breath.
What?
I don’t…..I don't love you. I’m sorry.
Perhaps my words find it hard to make meaning, clouded by tears as they are. He stares at me and then looks away. He steps back to make room for me to come in.
I sit on his bed and wipe my tears.
He perches on his reading table, shoulders slumped, and stares at me. I see tears begin to well in his own eyes.
My dad died, he says, wiping his tears with the sleeve of his shirt.