Living While Dying
“For as long as I can remember, I have not been living. I fear that I have only been existing. Inside of me, something is missing; something really big and really important is missing. I miss living.”
I had gotten the notification of my life sentence after an attack I had had when I was five years old. I was in school that day, it was a rainy day. All the kids in school had been ordered to wear their school cardigans but my baby brother had puked all over both of mine; the first one the night before, the second one, that morning so mother had given me my baby pink sweatshirt to stay warm. She was always so adamant about me staying warm, I wondered why.
That day my evil homeroom teacher seized my pink sweatshirt (I’m sure she wished she could buy her daughter something as pretty as that) and even punished me for wearing a cardigan that was not the school uniform.
She ordered me to go pick around the school in the rain, and I went about my job, the obedient student that I was, without so much as a breath of complaint. I was completely soaked to my underwear while my classmates were drinking hot chocolate and eating cookies in the class. (The school always served us cookies and hot chocolate during our short break on rainy days. We all looked forward to it.)
I was really angry but the source of my anger wasn’t my punishment. If anything, I was grateful to ‘officially’ be given the opportunity to dance, sorry, clean my surroundings, in the rain. The root of my anger was the fact that I was missing out on the ‘CHC’ break.
“Cookies and hot chocolate Naga… you are missing out on CHC right now. I just hope Dupe will be able to keep some for me. Even if it’s only the chocolate cookies, I still have the hot chocolate drink mom prepared for me.” I pouted.
After about an hour in the rain, she sent the evil witch of a class monitor (who happens to be her daughter by the way) to call me back into the class. Her name was Rainat but she had the smallmouth and beady black eyes of a rat so we called her ‘Rat’ instead. The rat was obviously pleased and satisfied to see me completely drenched in the cold. She giggled several times before stating the reason for her unwanted arrival.
“Mrs. Durojaiye calls for you. She says we have a pop quiz starting right now that will be recorded as your Continuous Assessment scores so you better start running down to the class. Oh, she also mentioned that it would be oral and she has no intention of waiting for any lazy student so…”
I didn’t wait for her to finish. I wasn’t going to allow any demon to destroy my perfect test scores. I was cold and hungry, my chest also felt funny but I dismissed it all because all I could think of at the time was getting into class in time for my test. I should have paid more attention then, maybe I wouldn’t be here now.
I got to the class on time, she was about to start the quiz. True to the little witch’s claim, it was indeed going to be an oral test. Just as I tried to dash to my seat to get my pencil and notebook ready, I was forcibly halted in my tracks by a human barricade that refused to allow me access into the classroom. This human barricade was a giant to me, she was my homeroom teacher. I wondered why she wouldn’t let me into the class when a test was about to ensue and proceeded to enquire about her motive for the action when she came out clean herself.
“You cannot enter this classroom dripping like that. I will not allow you to come in to destroy a perfectly neat and arranged classroom by making the entire place wet and messy. Stand outside!” I couldn’t utter a word, I was too shocked to even respond with my perfunctory “yes, ma’am”.
I walked back to the door of the classroom and gave her one more pleading look, my last chance at changing into warm clothes, quenching my hunger, and acing my test. No hope. I left the class crestfallen with my forehead touching my chest. I passed the little witch on my way out and as always I could see her evil smile etched wide on her face. No sign of rushing to the class for the test from her. I sighed, “no fair.”
Since the rain fell incessantly the entire day, I was left with no choice but to stay outside the entire day. I was beyond cold, I was frozen and starved. I rubbed my arms with my little palms to try to stay warm but that only had so much effect on my frozen body.
“I sure hope we get to close soon. I just wanna go home to mummy and have this nightmare of a day end. I’m so hungry right now, I could eat an entire buffalo!” I paused and thought about it. “No, that’s a lie, I can’t finish an entire buffalo.” Five years old me lying meant I was a sinner and I would go to the scary house made of fire that mummy had been warning me about.
She had said it was built for terrible sinners like me right now and the only way to escape that frightening house was to confess that I was a sinner, plead for mercy and not do it again.
I didn’t want to go to the scary house so I begged for forgiveness, calling myself a lot of disdainful names because I wanted the homeroom teacher marking the attendance of all the good kids that get to go to the humongous house upstairs to take pity on me and write my name there too (preferably among the top ten to assure my space at the front of the ‘great assembly’ as mother liked to call it.)
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Almost immediately after my plea of prayer, it stopped raining and I saw a very beautiful rainbow spread across the sky. It was almost as if the nice homeroom teacher (unlike the demon I had over here) in the big house upstairs was smiling down at me to reassure me that my name had been marked present in the great assembly. Feeling satisfied and at ease that I could ascend with the other good kids whenever we got called upon, I smiled back at her (she had to be female to be so considerate and forgiving right?), my two front teeth missing.
I was still smiling when Dupe came to call me back into the class. When I got to the front of the class this time around I didn’t try to run in, I simply stood by the door and waited for permission to be given to go in. I received it by the motion of the witch’s right hand, moving in the direction of my seat. “Thank God mommy always packages spare clothes for me. Right now I don’t even care about my test scores, I just wanna eat cos I’m hungry. I just hope my sandwich isn’t cold anymore.”
I was about to dig into my sandwich, the drool shamelessly dripping from the left corner of my mouth, when I was stopped halfway down my plunder. I looked at her with venom in my eyes. “What is it now?! Can’t you just leave me alone today? What did I ever do to you to deserve all these today?” I had so much to say but I was not about to throw all my mom’s training down the drain. I would not satisfy her by giving her a reason to punish me. “The big firehouse is waiting for witches like you!” I cursed inwardly.
“Being the caring teacher that I am, I have decided that you can take your test now. In fact, you must! So young lady, but that disgusting thing you call food away from your mouth and settle down to write your test.” I couldn’t take it anymore, I could see all my mom’s training slowly going down a drain in my mind’s eye.
She had called the precious mouth-watering sandwich my mom had prepared with so much love and affection disgusting. “I bet you wish you could actually taste something as rich as this I teased. You and your rat of a daughter look like you have never eaten a decent meal in your entire lives. If you were hungry you could have just asked me and I would have shared my leftovers with you, instead of going through all this stress out of jealousy or envy.” All the kids in the class started laughing, urging me on. I smirked.
Instinctively she touched her right cheek as if I had just slapped her with my venomous words. She was still in shock as she kept stuttering whenever she tried to start her sentence. “A-Are y-you t-talking to me? I am your homeroom teacher young lady! Where are your manners?!” I stood my ground and shouted my reply back at her “I don’t know Mrs. Durojaiye. Oh wait, I know… maybe it got washed off of me when you left me in the rain for over an hour! Don’t you dare talk to me about manners you witch!”
I expected it so she wasn’t privileged with the look of shock or fear she must have been hoping to see on my face when she slapped me thrice and ordered a student to bring her ruler since canes were forbidden in my preschool. I was beaten all over but I didn’t flinch an inch. I took all her beatings, glared at her, and went back to my seat to prepare for my test.
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I was halfway through my test when I felt a very sharp pain cut across my chest in a flash. It was so quick that I didn’t even have time to breathe in and out before it left. I held my chest and shut my eyes tightly. If Mrs. Durojaiye had noticed my pain, she pretended to be blind at that point because she made no move whatsoever to find out why her five-year-old pupil suddenly clutched her chest.
The pain came again, this time it lasted ten seconds. I couldn’t hold it in, I cried for help, but not to my surprise, my caring teacher did not flinch. She simply kept throwing her questions at me and watching over her flock. I looked at them too, happy kids playing happily while I felt like dying. I didn’t hate them for it though, if I wasn’t stuck with the evil witch in front of me I would be smiling happily too.
My eyes fell on Dupe, she was my rainbow in that cloudy classroom. She waved at me, gave me two thumbs up, and showed me the cookies she had kept for me, adding in a whisper that she would give them to me on our way home. I forced a smile back at her and held on to my chest. I wasn’t going to lose to the witch, I continued my test.
I finished my test and was about to take my first bite of the day when the closing bell rang. Dupe’s mom was a full housewife so she always came to pick us up early. Most times, she arrived before the closing bell was rung. Today was no exception as she was already at our classroom door when the bell rang. Asides my mom, of course, Mrs. Ojo was the kindest woman on earth. I was sure beyond a reasonable doubt that her name was among the top five in the register of the ‘great assembly’ for adults.
“Osasenaga, Dupe, come let’s go home but don’t run oh. The ground is still very slippery from the rain. I don’t want you to hurt yourselves.” Dupe and I smiled at her, running like the five-year-olds that we were but then I suddenly fell in my tracks. I had gotten another sudden pain in my chest but this one lasted longer than all the previous ones combined, I screamed in pain. “Help me! I want my mo…” I zoned out in the middle of my speech.
I woke up hours later in the comfort of a warm and cozy room. I was able to pick out my surroundings in bits and eventually my eyes rested on my mom’s worried eyes staring down at me. She was biting her fingers like a five-year-old, the way she always did when she was worried or anxious. I forced a weak smile and she ran to my side crying. She shouted for the doctors and nurses to come to examine me because I had woken up, they all seemed happy and sad at the same time.
After much oral and physical examination the doctor looked at my mom and nodded, she nodded back slowly, tears in her eyes. “Don’t cry mommy, I’m going to be just fine.” I wanted to comfort her so badly. Ever since Dad died on my baby brother’s birthday, she had fought hard and worked twice as much as any woman I knew to care for Ose and I. She was the kind of woman, the kind of mom I wanted to become.
“Now listen to me very carefully my dear. Three years ago, something happened to you, something similar to what happened today but you probably won’t remember it because you were still very tiny.” He demonstrated how tiny I was by holding his right thumb and index fingers very close to each other.
I knew in my mind of course that I wasn’t as small as that. “Even baby Ose is a hundred times bigger than that and I am a hundred times bigger than him.” I boasted, pouting at the same time. He laughed, cleared his throat, and continued his speech.
“Okay fine, you were much bigger than that but you were still tiny so you wouldn’t remember the pain. That incident almost stopped you from walking completely.” He paused to allow his words to sink in and to see if I had anything to say. I kept quiet, staring at him hard with rapt attention. He cleared his throat and went on.
“Anyway, that incident reoccurred today, and let’s just say you weren’t so lucky sweetheart. I’ll tell you this as straightforward as possible so you can understand me easily. You won’t be able to use these pretty legs of yours to walk around for now as you have something called a partial stroke. You can’t move your body from your waist down.”
I couldn’t believe him, so I turned to the one person I trusted the most in the world. “Mummy didn’t you warn him about the big, scary firehouse. He’s lying, tell him he’s going to go there if he keeps lying.” My mum was crying uncontrollably. I used my right palm to wipe her tears but they would not stop pouring down. I was so confused. I had never seen her cry so much, not even when my father left us.
“Don’t cry again mommy, if you keep crying I’ll start crying too.” I threatened. The tears had already started gathering around the corners of my eyes. I was crying, but not for myself. I was crying simply because the woman that meant everything to me was crying. I held her hands in mine tightly.
***
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I’m seventeen years old now but I still use a wheelchair. Two years ago, they finally had the boldness to reveal the truth about my condition. The damage I suffered twelve years ago wasn’t temporary as the doctor had told me. They had simply decided amongst themselves that I was too young to handle that kind of information, they wanted to enjoy my childhood and stay hopeful through the years.
They should have just kept on with the lie because even though I always saw right through it, at the very least I could pretend around my mom that I was happy, that I was living, that I felt fulfilled, even if just to make her happy. I was willing to feign happiness for the rest of my life in that wheelchair if it meant easing her burden. I would happily die knowing I existed while my mother thought I lived.
“I’m going to live my life to the fullest in this wheelchair for you, mom. Or at least pretend to be. I only feel like I’m existing to make you happy though, and at times, I honestly wish I could tell you that I don’t feel alive anymore. I desperately wish I could confide in you, dear mom, that I really miss living.”
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