Still here, still closed

Some days, I try to look for the personal property I’ve had the longest, and it’s not for any type of validation, only that I like to see the things I’ve bought for myself that have repaid me with the most benefits over the years. As I look around, the stories on each one come to me. The padlock I use to keep my gate secure. When you live in a place surrounded by other little houses, you feel the need to mark the territory of what’s yours. For ownership's sake, as pilfering has never been an issue in over five years of calling this place home. With every passing period when I forget to lock my gate or even lock the door, I come back to nothing missing, and nothing broken. It was an expensive purchase on the day I decided to buy what many would refer to as “top security”. Compared to the locks people put on their traveling boxes, and the one used to keep a cupboard safe enough from other students back in boarding school, this was in an elevated class of its own. Difficult to break, plus it was heavy too. My padlock holds anecdotes about the life I live. The rust on it and the force I sometimes need to exert to pull the key out show how loyal it has been to guarding someone who completely ignores it. Our relationship is cyclical, defined by a faux sense of safety. In the mornings when I’m leaving, I touch it, almost in the most profound exertion of nonchalance, and at night before retiring myself to sleep. I touch it, confirming nothing by firmness. Some days, I learn passive aggression from it. How difficult it makes itself to be when I need to unlock it on a rainy day. I see the stiffness, I see the message. By the time it accepts defeat and opens, the water has seeped into my skin. No message gets any clearer. But what has this old ally seen of me? Things I can’t tell everyone. If anything, I salute this lock for old time's sake. When there was nothing to protect. Not in this house, and not even in me. It saw me. It kept me when no one else wanted to. It’s the stillness that makes me want to talk to it. I’m not sure that my words won’t bounce back at me. To think I can reel up platitudes for it so as to subsume the fact that I never even paid attention to what was written on its body says a lot about me. “70mm MINDY Top Security.” It says a lot about me. The gentle announcement that I think words would undo the wounds I have inflicted on people’s hearts. To think that a smile would make everything go away, but that’s never the case. This piece of metal, alloyed into a combination I no longer have ideas about, rigid enough to call my bluff, and tells me to do my worst on rainy days has me in the same position my conscience has put me in for the past sixteen months. It has to have figured something out about me. I’m a master at fault-masking. A self-taught one. Even earned a certificate. I try to place a defect or a misbehavior early enough to prevent myself from looking too perfect. I bring myself down from the pedestals people put me on, and dare I say, people put me on a pedestal way too often. The padlock sat on my couch for weeks after I purchased it. I couldn’t bring myself to unpack it, to attach the keys to a holder. Almost as if that small act might force a reckoning. But the padlock understood what she wouldn’t: that my wittiness was loneliness wearing a mask. That patience changes nothing about what’s sealed shut. On the day it ended, it was a cold call, on a cold day as the workday was starting. When I got home that night, I ignored the very thing that had stayed with me longer than she had. I pushed the front door open, and I forgot to leave either the gate or the door. Slept in my clothes and snored my way through the night. It heard me, and it saw the way my entire self rehearsed normalcy the following day. A charming smile to the lady who sells foodstuffs by the street, another for the seamstress whom I’d never give my clothes to for amendment because everything with her is overpriced. A masculine nod to the yahoo boys that drink, smoke, and laugh too often, that I question if my corporate life has any relevance in a world where they are more liquid than I could ever be. I’m too quiet, and sometimes, I wish I could talk more. I wish my thoughts didn’t crystallize within me before I had to utter them. Joshua and I didn’t get along after I missed his wedding with Teni. As lovable as I’d always thought them to be, I couldn’t make it on that day. For reasons my padlock understood. That day, I didn’t open it. When I came out the following day with swollen eyes and a shoulder slouched from a full year of corporate disappointments, a terrible and disturbing reality of not only failing interviews, but also seeing someone else get the role you dreamed of without knowing half as much as you did. On that day, the MINDY Top Security stood by my side and said it wouldn’t let me go if I looked that way. I was seven again. Fresh from the barbershop, with a hairstyle I thought looked good for the baby face I had. Parental refusal caused all the hair on my head to be removed that day. Never knew why they hated the style so much. That resistance sounded like hate to me. But on this day, I knew the locks loved me. Perhaps it knew. That friendship and down moments were never for too long, and it definitely shook its head in an “I told you so” manner after Joshua and I came to a conclusion that Messi was undoubtedly the greatest player of all time ahead of Ronaldo. That night, in the backseat of his car, with himself and Teni in front, I realized that maybe the future wasn’t something I needed to forcefully bend and carve out for myself. Maybe I had to choose what was always best in the moment, and leave the future to worry about itself. I’m still not sure of the exact maxim that supports allowing things to go in the way it is meant to. I don’t know. My padlock definitely knows. That everyone who went through that gate was deserving of something I could never give at the present. It opines that I’m a better friend than a romantic lover, but Susan from twelve months ago would not be happy to hear that, as such was the rationale for the long piece I got to justify her decision about the situation. When I’m not looking at my own life, this piece of metal looks at it. It saw her stand at the gate the other day without wanting to enter. It saw me turn around without wanting to walk out the very gate. I was tired of having to meet people in the middle. Even I want to be received right here in my extremism. When I sit on my study table, I keep the solipsistic thoughts that I learn from women right beside me, and I watch narcissistic tendencies kiss me on the cheek, but I have been faithful to the locks that hold my gate. Never cheated on it, but I’ve thought of getting a new one after every rain bath I didn’t plan for. Yet, it’s here. Not as a result of my faithfulness, but as a result of being able to stay silent as I come to be the very person I once was, and still am. We are here because I can ignore it and get away with it. I couldn’t do that to her.

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