THE THINGS SHE LEFT IN THE ROOM - by Glory Afolabi: Glowing Indite

She thought she had said too much. It happened quietly. No one gasped. No one looked at her strangely. Nobody announced that she had crossed a line. The room simply continued breathing. People talked. Someone laughed. Another person picked up a new thread of conversation. But she had already left the room without moving. Somewhere inside her mind, she was standing alone, gathering the words she wished she hadn't released. Why did I say that? I shouldn't have told them that. Did I really just say all of that about myself? She lowered her head. Inhaled. Exhaled. A sigh escaped her like a confession. They had been talking about opportunities. Normally, she would have smiled, listened, and said the safest sentence she knew: “I've just been busy lately.” Busy was a beautiful hiding place. It revealed nothing. But today, somehow, the doors had opened. She mentioned a few things she had been doing. A few things she had been learning. A few things she had quietly built, carried, attempted, and survived. Nothing extraordinary, she thought. Yet the moment the words left her mouth, she felt strangely exposed. As though she had walked into the room without her usual coat. She wondered if everyone could see her now. Not her face. Her insides. Perhaps they were counting her words. Perhaps they knew more about her than she intended to give them. Perhaps she had misplaced something precious. She could not name it. So she called Tolu. “Bro Tolu…” She hesitated. “Do you think I spoke too much today?” She tried to explain the strange weight sitting on her chest. Later, she asked Rantimi too. Different people. Same uneasiness. Rantimi listened and said, “Glory, you didn't talk too much. You probably feel that way because you don't normally talk. What you said was good. It brought impact. People learnt from you. Trust me, someone probably took action because you spoke.” She listened. But the feeling remained. Then Tolu said, “You felt that way because you're conscious of what is within you. You felt like a virtue left you.” She looked at him. He reminded her of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment. Jesus knew that something had gone out of Him. “Maybe that's what happened to you,” he said. “People got life from you. You impacted something.” Something became quiet inside her. Maybe she had mistaken pouring for losing. Maybe she had spent so long guarding the well that she had forgotten what wells were for. Water is not wasted because someone drinks from it. And perhaps words are not wasted because they leave the mouth. Perhaps some things are placed inside us precisely because they are not meant to remain there forever. Still, she wondered why being seen frightened her so much. Why did vulnerability sometimes feel like guilt? Why did she replay conversations long after they ended, dissecting every sentence like a detective searching for evidence of a crime? Why did opening one little window into herself sometimes feel like leaving the entire house unlocked? Sometimes, the guilt came with a headache. Sometimes, she wished she could gather her words from the air and push them back into her mouth. But perhaps she didn't need to. Perhaps the words had somewhere else to go. Perhaps they had entered someone else's life. Perhaps someone needed the very thing she was regretting giving away. And perhaps, just perhaps, she hadn't left pieces of herself in that room. She had left seeds. She just couldn't see what they would become yet.

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