Today Smells Like 2005 - by Tomilola Adejumo

Bayo moved like the world owed him space.He walked through our house as if the corridor would shift for his feet, as if the chairs knew to slide out of his way, as if doors opened because they wanted to see his face. He had that kind of confidence, the loud, careless type that didn’t need to announce itself.That morning, he wrapped his navy-blue school sweater around his waist and stood in front of the mirror, adjusting it even though he had done it a thousand times. His school bag was slung over one shoulder, not both, never both. He once said wearing it on both sides made you look like you were trying too hard. His hair was freshly trimmed, and the line-up on the side of his head looked like someone used a ruler to mark it.He was humming again. Not singing, just humming. It always started low, as if the song was still unsure of itself. He never hummed full lyrics, only the hooks. That morning it was Imagine that you and me could just be more than friends. Styl-Plus again. Always Styl-Plus.I watched him from the kitchen, rinsing rice that didn’t need rinsing again, just so I could stay there longer. He caught me looking but didn’t say anything. He only gave me that grin, the one that curled up slowly like he was chewing something sweet, the one that said you’ll miss me when I’m gone, but in a joking way.Then he said, “Later,” and the door closed behind him.That was it.No drama. No lightning. No strange dream the night before. Just a door closing and silence settling into a house that didn’t know yet that it was about to lose its loudest sound.At first, we waited like normal. It wasn’t strange for Bayo to come home after sunset. Sometimes he followed Aunty Sola to her shop. Sometimes he stopped to play ball. Sometimes he bought suya and hid it under his shirt like it was contraband. But eight o’clock came. Then nine. Then ten. The gate stayed shut. No knock. No humming. No sweater.Our mother started boiling water she wouldn’t use. Our father stood at the gate longer than necessary. He walked down the street in house slippers, nodding at people who didn’t know what he was looking for. That was the first time I saw him afraid. Not angry. Not annoyed. Not tired. Afraid.By midnight I stopped rinsing the same cup of rice.The next morning we began looking. His school. The football field. The cyber café near the mosque. Then the places you mention only when your heart is ready for ugly truths. The canal. The back of the Keke park. The uncompleted building on Olowu Street.Nobody had seen him. Not even the newspaper man who saw everything.Our mother called people who hadn’t heard from us in years. Our father printed a blurry picture and stapled it to electricity poles. He wrote “MISSING” in bold red marker, as if colour could shake the city awake.People began saying things, and they said them without shame. That he ran away. That he joined cult boys. That he got on a bike and never looked back. The worst part was that even the lies started to feel more comforting than the silence.Weeks turned into months. The posters faded. His bed remained untouched. The family photo in the parlour got rearranged without him. I don’t know who did it. Maybe our father. Maybe the wall.But I couldn’t let go. I kept listening for him. I would press my ear to the door before entering rooms. I would stand in the corridor with my eyes closed, hoping I’d feel that energy he used to carry. Sometimes I thought I heard him whistling while the tap ran. Or humming in the background when PHCN brought light. But the house stayed quiet.One day, I returned from school and found that our mother had packed his clothes into a black nylon bag and placed it on top of the wardrobe. She didn’t say anything about it. She just served me food as if nothing had shifted. But I didn’t eat that evening. My spoon just kept scraping the side of the plate while I stared at the chair he used to drag noisily to the table.It was around that time that I started noticing her changes. Small things, at first. The way she spoke in whispers to herself while she swept the house, as if asking questions nobody could answer. Or the way she would stand by the window, staring out at nothing, her eyes vacant, like she had lost something and couldn’t remember what.Our mother used to hum, too, before Bayo disappeared. I think I had forgotten about it until one day, I heard her humming that same Styl-Plus song he used to love. Not the one he’d sing half-heartedly but the one she’d hum quietly, as though no one would hear her. The melody echoed in the house for days after, looping in the silence. But it didn’t sound the same.She was becoming a ghost of herself, and I couldn’t say anything. It was as if she didn’t want us to see what was happening. I began to feel like the house was shrinking, the walls closing in on us, trapping all of us inside this heavy, suffocating grief.He became an ache that refused to settle in one place. Some days it sat in my throat. Other days it pressed down on my chest like someone leaning. Sometimes it disguised itself as anger, especially when I saw brothers laughing together at the bus stop, pushing each other for fun, tying sweaters around their waists.Once, near Tejuosho, I saw someone that looked like him. The boy had the same walk, the same confident lean. I shouted his name across the road. He turned. It wasn’t him. But his eyes lingered a bit longer than they should have, as if he recognised me. Or pitied me. Or both.Years passed and we stopped talking about him. Not because we forgot, but because remembering was too loud. Our mother started saying things like, “God knows best.” Our father filled the silence with prayers he mumbled during morning devotion. But I started writing things down. His full name. The songs he used to hum. The way he never finished his cornflakes. The smell of the powder he sometimes used when he didn’t want to bathe.Then one day, everything changed.I was at the car wash on a Saturday, reading a book in the front seat while the boys sprayed soap and shouted over each other. I looked up, casually, and saw him. Not a version of him. Not a resemblance. Him.He was walking past in a green kaftan, slightly taller, with a small scar on his chin he didn’t have before. His eyes swept across the lot quickly, but I know he saw me. I know because his shoulders stiffened, just for a second, before he turned away and kept walking.I flung the door open and ran after him. My slippers slapped the concrete, and my heart screamed his name. But by the time I turned the corner, he was gone.I stood there, breathless, disoriented. A man nearby asked if I was okay. I nodded and thanked him. Then I walked back slowly, barefoot, with my mind doing the kind of math grief doesn’t allow. That scar. That walk. That stillness in his eyes.He had seen me. I was sure.But he didn’t stop.Maybe he couldn’t.Maybe he didn’t want to.Or maybe I imagined it?I didn’t tell anyone. What was I going to say? That my brother who vanished one morning is now a man in a kaftan with a scar who doesn’t want to be found?Days passed. I told myself it was a mistake. A trick of the light. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw him again, his face, so close, yet untouchable. It became a thought that refused to leave me. I woke up with it. I went to bed with it. My fingers twitched as if I could still reach out and grab him.I tried to shake it off, but it sat inside me, growing, feeding on whatever sanity I had left. And then, one afternoon, I stood at the bus stop, feeling the wind hit my face, and I wondered if it had all been real. The way my brother had vanished. The way the house had hollowed out. The way everything had just shifted. Maybe I had been losing my mind, just like her. Maybe I had already started to unravel.I felt it then, the creeping doubt, the feeling that I might be as broken as my mother. That maybe, just maybe, I had imagined everything.Maybe, in a world where nothing makes sense, we all just end up searching for something that isn’t there.And in the wind, as it whipped through the streets and pressed against my skin, I let it all go, just for a second. Not because I wanted to believe, but because the wind carried things no one else could bring.Like a boy who once walked out the door humming a song he never finished.And didn’t come back.

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