I Am Dave
If you are a fan of teenage series or high school drama series, then you must be familiar with the nerd-unloved-guy trope. You know the one with zero friends and zero personality? Always with his head in his books, pushing his five-sizes-too-big-round-framed glasses up his nose CONSTANTLY, talking out of context, and basically stammering all through a conversation? The one who never gets any of the girls, is smart but remains tongue-tied in social discourse? Well, that’s sort of who I am. That is who I am actually. I am Dave Elba and this is my life story.
I am the first and only son of Mr. and Mrs. Elba (obviously) and the victim/brother to a scary 9-year old girl. I’ve never been in love, but I’ve had my own fair share of crushes. More than enough actually. My one true love is my computer, whichever version it is. My first one came five years ago and since then, I’ve not been able to take my eyes off her. Literally. Now, let’s go back to my family.
My father is an engineer, a good one at that. I took a computer-related major in school but for some reason, my dad still believes I was born to fix broken computers. Sometimes I feel he does it as a weird sort of prank because I refuse to believe that a top-rank Chemical Engineer in a multinational company is unable to comprehend the difference between a software and hardware engineer. My mother on the other hand is a seamstress, a great one at that. Using my father’s connection, she makes clothes for all the officials at his office and their spouses. She even started a suit line recently that is doing pretty well. My father is a proud ambassador of her brand and he wears the clothes she sews him everywhere he goes. Personally, I feel he’s just taking advantage of the free premium clothes.
I did most of my growing up within the four walls of a classroom. School has always and will always be my safe haven. While people ran away from class, I ran towards it. I guess that’s why I grew up socially awkward because most of my hobbies and interests cost me friends. I complained bitterly about my lack of friends to my parents but my mother only told me that, ‘what is yours will come.’ My father, on the other hand, hissed and asked me to fetch him a cup of water.
My father was never the one to check up on me in school. I know you feel like this is yet another one of those absent-father stories, but my father was and is not an absent-father. I just grew up believing that a man had to do what a man needed to do. He worked tirelessly for hours, returning to a warm bath and hot food, and he slept like he had carried the whole world on his shoulders throughout the day. No matter how hard or deep he slept, he was always up by 4 am. I don’t know how he did it. As a child, when I would silently curse my parents to hell for daring to wake me before 7 am, I liked to imagine that he had an internal alarm clock that woke him up at the same time every single day. The first time my father stepped into my school was on my senior secondary school graduation. That day is still one of my best days ever.
Maybe that’s what fathers are for – to show up for all the big moments and leave the little (and somehow, most important) moments to our mothers. Anyways, I never thought much of it. He raised me to be self-sufficient all by myself. As the first child and son of my parents, I was raised more like a parent-assistant than a child. My mother made it a point of duty to always remind me that I was her husband. When she was in a good mood, she called me ‘oko mi’ which means ‘my husband’, a term of endearment Yoruba women use for their favorite male child/relative.
I’ve got another headache tonight. And I’ll probably have a nastier one by tomorrow morning, seeing as I won’t be getting any sleep tonight. I am working on a project. A big one. The craziest software to ever hit the African market, if I do say so myself. This software will be my entry ticket to the job of my dreams, at Google. Yes, yes. Don’t look at me like I am going crazy. Everybody can dream, right? Of course, everybody can dream, but how many people actually live their dreams? Maybe a sad 2%.
I don’t even care if just 10 people in the world ever live their dreams, I am going to be one of those ten. I am so confident that I would get in because I am ready to work my ass off till I get to where I want to be. I know that sounds cliché but I really am putting in the work. I’ve had the idea for this software since I was in secondary school. At first, it was just banter among friends.
We were talking about the amazing things computers can do and then we deviated from that to the things we wished computers could do. Myself, Bola, and Felix were in this heated discussion and we kept coming up with the craziest things. Bola said he wished computers could send hologram versions of his physical body to class, so the real him could stay indoors and sleep in. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Felix thought so too, but he wished the hologram would be able to speak, write, and also carry out several tasks. We thought that would be far-reaching but we were little boys, and we let our minds fly high and free.
It was a beautiful time and since then, the idea has been planted in my mind. Bola has now moved on to agriculture, following in his father’s footsteps while Felix left for Italy, to do God-knows-what (following in his older brother’s footsteps). They probably do not remember the events of that day, but it’s something I have not been able to get out of my mind for years. I have come to believe that it might just be my life long purpose to bring my friend’s idea to life.
Well, that’s enough about me and my dreams. Let me introduce you to the rest of my family. My sister. Whew! That’s a whole chapter. One paragraph would not be enough. Her name is Lola, short for Omolade. Her name means ‘a child that brings wealth’ and that is exactly what she did. When I was born, our father was working a crazy 12-hour job that paid him peanuts. He woke up too early and slept too late. Somehow, we still managed to run out of all our food and also our neighbor’s good graces before we visited the market again.
Mother at that time had just finished her diploma and no company wanted to hire a secretary with a 1-year-old and a broke husband who could not afford daycare. So, my mother took a loan from her sister and started selling provisions from our house. In the first month, my dad refused to remit money for foodstuff, and instead, asked my mother to feed us from the meager provisions she was selling.
This caused a huge rift in my family and my mother moved out and went back to her mother. She stayed there for almost 6 months and it was like the marriage was going to end. I was too young to know all this, but my mother is a master storyteller, she left no details out. It took three visits from my father’s family to my mother to get her back to the cramped one-room apartment.
It was probably the make-up sex that conceived my brother, because barely nine months later, my mother came back home with a pink baby and called him my brother. She wanted to place him in my hands but I ran off crying. My baby brother didn’t live long, just one month. I’m not sure what killed him, and I’ve never tried to ask.
His death remains a sore topic for my parents, and they only talk about him in hushed tones. Even Lola does not even know he existed. I remained an only child for the next ten years. It was actually a very reasonable arrangement. We had fewer mouths to feed and fewer responsibilities. We kept struggling and life was never fun. I had fewer toys, and I… that’s by the way.
Out of the blue, Mummy got pregnant again. Not like she told me, but I was already old enough to know these things. Plus, people kept smiling at me and telling me I was about to be a big boy. Lola came, and oh, we felt it. Everything changed. From Daddy’s job to mother’s business. Daddy got a better job at a big engineering firm one month before Lola was born. While Mummy was pregnant, she was advised to stay away from any kind of stressful work because of her history with pregnancies.
She used the free time to learn sewing and she discovered that she had the knack for it. As soon as Daddy got his first salary, he bought her a sewing machine, the most expensive appliance in our one-room apartment at that time. Fast forward to 9 years later and we are living in a tastefully furnished five-bedroom apartment in the heart of Lagos state, one of the cities with the most expensive cost and quality of living.
Since she came, she has never lacked anything. Everything was supplied in twos. One for her, and one for her alter-ego. Because she does have one! She is as annoying as she is smart. As young as she is, she comes up with the trickiest and craziest ways to get me to my wit’s end. She tries so hard to offend me, it has literally turned into a sport, one in which she constantly gets gold medals.
The worst part is that every kind of discipline I can think to give her is met with fierce opposition from both my parents. Sometimes, it makes me wonder if I was not their child after all, because I still carry scars of my encounters with my father’s belt. One time, she dipped my new laptop in a bucket of water because she wanted to ‘cool it down’.
There’s a level of anger that leaves you so weak and tired that you become incapable of any kind of confrontation. That’s what she manages to make me feel with every single prank/trick. To my parents, she is the golden girl. The golden egg laid by a golden hen. The answer to all their prayers and if they had their way, their only child.
So, there you go. These are the most important people in my life. Not that I actually have a lot of them. The numbers keep reducing as I grow older. I am socially awkward and so making friends is a hassle that I rather not experience. My first few attempts at this venture landed me in situations I would rather not speak about and now, I have come to the conclusion that some people are better off left alone.
My family, my laptop, and my dreams are all I need to be who I am. Shy, withdrawn, smart, and a little too hairy than normal. Weird, but that is what makes me who I am. That is what makes me Dave Elba, and I am not about to change. Well, not if I become ‘Dave Elba, Software Engineer at Google Incorporated.’ Oh, the joy when that day comes!
All pictures are from Pexels and no attribution is required.
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