And Death Did not Come For You

By Isaac Aju.

You didn’t know what was happening to you then. It was later that you will discover that it was called acute teenage depression. It weighed heavily on you, and you did not know what it was. It was greater than a mere sadness, bigger than sorrow, something you did not know how to go about explaining. You just wanted to sleep and not wake up again. Why was that even a hard request?

“God, I’m tired. I just want to go,” you would cry in the night, but the next day you would see yourself still alive.

A lot of things were happening in your life, things that seemed to crush your soul. Your parents made everything worse. They did not give you any freedom of speech or space. Almost everything you said and did were critiqued, and you were tagged as lazy, stubborn, disobedient.

You were 19, recently out of secondary school, working with your parents, and your whole world was falling apart; there was nothing to lean on to, no one to talk to, no one to make you feel like a normal human being who could be flawed, but still human.

You became withdrawn from people, desired more solitude, and you read books for comfort. A heavy weight kept overtaking your whole body, telling you to end everything, so on that day after a bitter exchange of words with your parents you ran into the toilet with the kitchen knife. You aimed the knife at your stomach. You held the knife rigidly, but you couldn’t harm yourself. You’ve watched on TV where people took their lives. You’ve seen it many times in Nollywood movies. Where did they summon the courage to do that? To insert a knife into their flesh?

You looked at the knife in your hand, and you saw hot tears pouring down from your eyes. You dropped the knife on the toilet floor, and you began to weep. You would weep for a complete hour, the tears nonstop. It was the longest weeping period of your life, if one kept an account of weeping bouts. Why was it so hard to leave? You didn’t want to be anybody’s child again. You didn’t want to live again.

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You didn’t want to continue being in a place where you were always attacked with words. When you were done with your weeping, you came out of the toilet, eyes red and swollen. But death did not come for you after you called upon him. Even the next day, and the day after the next day.

(428 lines)