Ten thousand days of solitude

Finding the threads from the past that has led to what I’ve become. Part One: The most questionable thing I have done to myself is to become boring. Not in the way I like to present it, the stealth version. But truly boring. I look forward to times when I am more with myself than with others. At the gate of the office, I swing my little gate open and feel the padlock as I have come to enjoy these days. Someone bought a powerbank to keep my social battery alive in this multinational space, and it works. The weariness of socializing here is real. It is the type of weariness that empties you while you stand. But the powerbank only charges at the office gate. I become unplugged on the road home. The calls come afterwards. Sometimes I don’t want to talk. Other times I am content with the friends I speak to every day. I cannot keep onboarding new people. I cannot keep repeating stories I have told a thousand times. With my friends, retelling is unnecessary. My life is a movie they did not buy tickets to see. I did not choose the boring life. I think it chose me. Part Two: On a Sunday morning, a notification forced the light of my phone into my eyes. I squinted. “Good morning cave man…I’m good. Yeah, see you by 6pm.” That is all. That is everything. I liked the brevity. Something that did not ask for much back and forth. Stormzy said it best: niggas never keep it brief. So he puts his phone on DND. Stormzy is me. I am Stormzy. That text, arriving four years after a girl on a dating app called me boring. That text confirms nothing has changed. I am still that same little boy. Part Three: I was on a dating app once. A very hot girl swiped right. Her opening line was this: from your pictures, you look boring. I do not remember if I replied. What I remember is the yellow balloon holding those black texts. It is still clear in my head. At work, I am the example they point to. Look at how he does not fail exams. Look at how much he reads in six months. Look at the presenter who does not need motivation. His delivery sounds rehearsed, perfect, so coordinated. But she said I looked boring. So I ask myself: am I supposed to change? Four years. Nothing. Still that same little boy. Part Four: When I was seven, I stopped living with my grandparents in the village. I moved in with my actual parents. I understood dialects there. Thick dialects. The ones that make you feel certain words in your chest. But my parents’ neighborhood was strange. The kids who came to play did not speak my language. I could not participate in their communal conversation. I did not understand the jokes. When jabs were thrown, I had no words. No arrows for rebuttal. Solitude found me at a tender age. Some nights my mother forced me to bed when the movies they were watching were rated. Too much for a child. I stayed in my room, alone, staring out the window late at night. I was terrified that everything I had seen in horror movies would come for me. I slept in fear. Tears came. They dried on my face by morning. But the mornings brought something like peace. A mechanical welcome back into the family. That peace never felt possible. Every time I was too happy, I remembered that rugs could be pulled from under my feet. I could be sent back to my room anytime. So I learned caution. I learned the art of being present and absent at once. I was a little boy they could see. But I could not afford to have a voice loud enough to be heard. My mother and father had a life. It played before me sometimes. Before they knew I was there, it had already ended. I learned to stay quiet. Silent. Gentle. To take up as little space as possible. Today, I am mostly alone even when with people. I stay in my thoughts. My fears are radically overwhelming. Part Five: Because it is easy for me to fall into things, I remember my childhood. I recited verses, definitions, mathematical formulas. Things many people could not pull from themselves. I was the boy who knew. As I moved through secondary school, I loved good music. But I never felt cut out for dancing with people in public. I never felt at home in places where the noise cancelled my inner thoughts. I always felt empty after the noise. It felt like a betrayal of my mind. Like I had let myself get shut out. So I stopped going. Part Six: I have always been comfortable with a truth: there will always be a smarter person. A better-looking person. A richer person. Even a more godly person. I have never seen myself as a benchmark for excellence. Not in straight A semesters. Not in multiple overall best student awards. As a second year undergrad, I scored 91 percent in a Chemical Engineering course. The lecturer asked to see me. I did not want to see him. I had been friends with every physics, chemistry, and biology teacher in secondary school. The scores were always between 87 and 95 percent. But I preferred not to be known in that familiar way. I loved to do what I needed to do without maintaining the standard of normalcy attached to my existence. I could never tie the laces of the smartest people I have met. Part Seven: In recent times, sitting at my study table, I have thought about my heroes. Who they are. Who they should be. By what metrics they are chosen. I cannot find them. My heroes are those who have looked through this world, observed it, understood it, and decided to be who they are without the fame the world gives. As educated as I think myself to be, I hate the spotlights. I am not sure if it is because at some point I knew those scary characters from horror movies were never going to appear in the darkness the curtains shielded. So I got comfortable. I got used to the solitude. It has been over ten thousand days now. Part Eight: There are weekends I do not open my doors. Weekends I do not take calls. Over a hundred pages of books get consumed. I force myself to eat the food I make, not the food others have made. I have learned to be enough for myself. In touching grass, I have realized something simple: I would rather not. The cave man stays in his cave. And the cave, it turns out, was exactly where I needed to be all along.

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