CHAPTER ONE:

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My name is . . . Shit, hold on, there is this handsome young man smiling at me across the frustration that is the airport road traffic. Those little ones at Our Ladies of Apostles school have called it a day, the road is teeming with loving or conditioned parents, as the case may be. Anyway, this young man’s smile is dazzling. He looks familiar, maybe I saw him this morning when I squeezed a blob of toothpaste on the brittle of my toothbrush, you know, that smiling man or woman or man and woman on every toothpaste tube or pack. I want to smile back but my depression has set my face in stone. I’ve become too critical, I overthink things too much. Looking through the glass of my car, I ask myself “What’s the point smiling at that beautiful man who shouldn’t be anywhere else but a toothpaste pack”,”Would it lead anywhere”,”Would it sleep with me”,”Will I enjoy it”,”What if he just wants to have his way like the rest of his primal counterparts,that disgusting gender of human beings” . . . the thoughts go on and on, my brain is on overdrive, temporary respite comes when I see an opening, I careen my toyota corolla through. At least now the torture of gazing upon that beautiful creature is suspended.

Still out in this nasty traffic jam, which is giving me another reason to not breed more children for Nigeria, because less children, less traffic jam. We could go on and on until we are standing at a certain door, peeping through the keyhole, watching closely as extinction makes a fist and go tap. tap. tap. And it will be totally fine with me. We are all going to die someday anyway. Might as well just get it over with. There’s a dull thud on my window, which pulls gossamer of revelry covering my mind a away. I jerk on my seat with the grace of stag that just heard the song of a bullet fly between it’s antlers. In my mind, I give the paper boy pressing a magazine against my window some points for trying to frighten me to death. He was really creative appearing out of nowhere, real Batman like. I look at the magazine. Front page, There’s the governor, arms around the waist of a really gorgeous woman, if I’m speaking honestly, I quailed at the picture. Something about the beauty looks illegal. What the hell is she looking like that for ?! And there is my governor looking grateful. I look down at the caption, I see “WEDDING”. The word was like a long bolt of electricity burning everything in it’s path. I wave my inept assassin away. I’m not buying that nonsense. I’m not paying 500 naira to look at people flaunt their wealth and marital bliss. It will be televised in the evening news, good things come to cheap people sometimes.

The traffic jam has lessened. Parents finally removed their hellspawns from school, now I can get home. It’s a short drive, but a little sanity will be appreciated and silence only turns my mind into a herd of wild horses racing around some perilous desert in Dakota or somewhere that looks deserted in Old America peppered with wild horses. I put the auxiliary cable between my phone and car stereo, Kendrick Lamar’s Complexion (Zulu love) starts floating inside the car. I didn’t relate to this rapper at one point, I couldn't until I read up on Malcolm X. Chatting about black liberation, equal human rights. Only then could I relate to this rapper and other “coloured” people living in America or somewhere else where this racism is actually being enforced. Here. In Nigeria. Edo State. I wouldn’t kid around and tell you we don’t have the slave mentality the white man put on us. Oh yes we do. When a white man comes through town the subconscious activates the “yes massa” behaviour and not to mention The William Lynch theory, those nasty German slave masters put in our little minds. Turning slaves against slaves because one is a lot of shades lighter on the skin than the other, you know to quell any bright idea that might lead to a slave uprising. Master was smart. Today, because I’m light skinned, men prefer me, some women too. Because skin so bright almost like the colour of a setting sun. Well, what do I care about race. I’m a Nigerian in Nigeria. Being Black is normal here. It’s so normal we don’t even use thew word black except we refer to objects not humans.

There I go again, living in my head. I don’t even know when the song ends, I don’t know when the playlist is over. I don’t know how I drove safely to the front of my gate. I only snap back into reality when I hear a car horn go off, it was me I step back into planet earth and find myself midway honking away for Adamu to let me in. How did I get here? How could I be so absentminded on the road? What is happening to me?

So, My name is Cynthia and I am depressed or that’s what my mother says. Don’t ask why, I wouldn't even know how to give the answer if I could.