I don’t recall when exactly; it began. It is one of those mysteries that will forever haunt me, along with why it began, how it began, and what I can do—if anything at all—to stop it. All I know is that one day I found myself inexplicably outside of it all. Far removed. A thing out of place.
The realisations themselves came slowly.
One morning I noticed, as I scrutinised my reflection in the mirror, how neat my dreadlocks were—how tight the roots, despite it being almost three months since my last hair appointment. I could still see the clean flesh exposed in triangular lines. Could still feel the tug on my scalp. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could still smell the hair gel. I brought this up with my brother, Jide, but he didn’t make too much of it. “You probably don’t remember,” he suggested. “It can’t have been that long ago.”
A week later, after a particularly grim job interview, I barrelled through my front door and scratched my arm on a loose nail. It felt worse than it looked. The gash was long, stretching from elbow to shoulder, but it was too faint to cause any alarm. The surrounding skin had only slightly reddened and the elbow–which had experienced the brunt of the needle’s wrath–had just a few specks of blood.
But the pain was immense. My mother says I’ve always been “tender on the skin, tender in the heart”. It took everything in me not to cry out in frustration–first the interview and now this. My spirit was in knots.
I wouldn’t stop touching the wound. I wouldn’t stop feeling for any sign of swelling or wondering if the little gash had somehow widened to spill more blood. I went to bed with my fingers grazing it lightly, browsing Quora for strangers’ opinions about tetanus, wondering if I had to go to a doctor.
The next day the scratch was gone. Nothing–not a scar, not even the dull shadow of a throb–remained.
None of this did more than create a vague itch, an unremarkable sense of unease at the back of my mind. How was I to know, with just those little signs, that I had entered a place out of time? That I no longer aged, and my body had become a bizzare capsule of perpetuity? No, back then I thought it was a thing my mind was doing to itself, a glitch—one that made me interpret things wrong. But I am quick to blame my mind because it is not a friend. It has never been a friend.
Depression is the word. When uttered, it transforms a living person into a hazard.
Since I turned 16, I have felt nothing but that. An inability to breathe. A sense of being drowned by time itself. Depression—the word I and my mother feared for different reasons. She feared it because it made people think she was a bad parent; I feared it because I worried it would kill me.
Depression had turned my brain to foam and my body into a wet blanket. It made growing up hard. It made the world feel like thick sludge, impossible to inch through without exhausting myself. It must have been during this depression that, unbeknownst to me, I broke away.
That’s my theory. That one day I became so profoundly sad, I ceased to exist.
I was an unemployed, fresh graduate–my days were full of repetitions even before It began. This is how it goes with depression. You wake up, open your phone, and find something to do until the sun goes down. You eat but hate yourself for it afterwards. You bathe only when your odour brings an unbearable amount of self-loathing. You don’t speak to anyone. You think of dying but console yourself with the assurance that you are too scared of death to ever attempt it. You try to find peace, but the sadness always returns.
You concede. You repeat.
I was so focused on my own sadness, I failed to realise that other things were on repeat as well. My slippers turned up at the same spot every morning, at the foot of my bed, regardless of where I’d kept them the night before. My wardrobe was always dishevelled, no matter how often I tried to organise it. I grew no more body hair, and if I shaved it always returned by morning. I could neither lose nor gain weight.
On my 24th birthday, I came downstairs to find Jide and Mummy with smiles on their faces, holding a tiny chocolate cake that said, “Hurrah for 23!”
I was stuck.
I began to watch it all very carefully. How had I not noticed that I never did laundry anymore? Or that the stain on my bathroom mirror reappeared every time I wiped it off? How wasn’t I aware that the constant ache on my right shoulder—a dull throb, barely perceptible—never seemed to heal?
But time… time was moving forward. Time passed from Monday to Tuesday to Saturday to August to December to March. Flowers died and blossomed. The weather changed. Mummy got fatter and Jide’s broken leg healed. I was in a stasis, the things around me frozen out of place. But everyone else went on.
Jide’s birthday was approaching and Mummy asked me to order him a cake.
“Okay,” I said. “And what are we telling the baker?”
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“Jide’s age,” I clarified. “What number are we putting on the cake?”
She looked askance at me. “20! This girl… You don’t know your little brother’s age again?”
And she was right this time. Jide was 20. He was 19 the year before, and 18 the year before that. And in ten years he will be 30, and I will still be 23.
* * *
The first time I killed myself, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. A sort of crazed need to end it all that I’d experienced dozens of times in the past but overlooked out of fear and uncertainty. Now, I’d been 23 for three years and I’d never been more certain about anything in my life. Something was wrong. Some cosmic mistake had been made in a world without a complaint department. I was utterly alone, and only I could correct it.
Mummy sent me to make a withdrawal from the bank, money for her latest business venture. Something sketchy—probably a scam—but that wasn’t anything new for her. Mummy has always been bad with money. She’s always trusted the wrong things.
I did not feel guilty—not really. My death would save her from the scam and protect our family from another financial crisis. That was my excuse. And as I walked into the bank’s top-floor bathroom and flung myself out of the window, it made me feel vindicated.
Ah, but I know pain now. Pulsing, searing, fiery pain spitting out at you like hot oil. I know agonising pain, the sort that squeezes your viscera in one moment and makes every muscle in your body relax in the next. Final, murderous pain. The pain at the end of the universe.
The End.
The next morning, I woke up to my slippers, once again, by my bed. My dreadlocks were the same—clean-cut and shoulder-length, the faint smell of hair gel clinging to it. My armpits were bare, and my right shoulder still ached softly. I’d only just wiped the small blue stain off my mirror, smearing it on the hand towel, when I realised: God. I should be dead.
It landed on the centre of my chest, a force that pushed me back until my calves hit the bathtub. It felt like fear.
There was no denying what the mirror was saying: I was unbloodied and unbruised, the picture of health. Yet only moments before, I felt every bone in my body break. I felt my blood vessels rip themselves to shreds. I felt myself fall apart from myself. I felt the unquestionable silence of The End.
The voice that came from me was not mine. Not human. It tore out of every pore, every crevice, every gap. A wail of despair so harsh it took something from me that I will never get back.
I dropped, retching uncontrollably. The shock had drawn the heat from me and made me cold. This is how my mother found me: cold and delirious on the bathroom floor, vomiting into the tub and groaning with the weight of the grief in my chest. She put her hands on me and I leaned in, seeking the warmth.
There were no questions from her, just the rhythmic rubbing of my back as I heaved, cried, cursed and shivered. I wore my body out. And then I fell asleep, knowing that by tomorrow the vomit would be gone, my mother would forget, and the slippers would be back where they always were—by the foot of my bed.
It was a whole year before I attempted to die again. Even with how difficult living had become, dying always seemed marginally harder. This one was less spontaneous: I took a bus to Ibadan, faked an emergency and told the driver to drop me on a long stretch of empty road surrounded by thick green bushes. Then I found a strong tree and hung myself.
I don’t remember why I picked this place, or why I chose to do it in this way. I don’t remember why I thought it would work this time around.
When I woke up in bed again, I just crawled into a ball and cried for hours. Mummy had to break the door down to get to me, but that was fine. It’d be fixed tomorrow, and she wouldn’t remember why her palms burned from the effort.
I didn’t stop trying to die after that, but my reasons soon changed. After the first few times, it just became a thing to do out of boredom. I was curious. Desensitised.
I crossed a threshold the time I managed to get my hands on a gun.
It was at a small gun shop in Maryland that only required a license if you couldn’t pay enough under the table. The owner–a yellow man with no eyebrows–offered me some advice, a little good to balance out the sin of the sale: “Person wey hold this thing,” he said. “Their finger go start to dey itch.”
But I already itched, I wanted to tell him. I itched so much it turned my flesh raw.
The gun disappeared from under my pillow the next morning; probably back to the store like I had never been there. But that wasn’t a problem. A bullet couldn’t satiate me anyway. It was mundane, and my mother always said I was a creative. That I could find the magic in anything.
Despite the pain, there is a quiet that is peculiar to death. Sleep is not nearly as quiet. Not nearly as serene, or empty. It became my favourite feeling. By my fifth 23rd, I’d died over 40 times.
It was unhealthy, but it gave me respite. I did it more frequently, more gratuitously. I tried to be artistic about the locations: in the cinema, at the beach, at bus stops or abandoned construction sites. I began making productions out of them. I was making elaborate plans, I was creating scripts. It was all I could think of. Every moment in my life now was chasing that quiet.
I couldn’t even remember why any of this was bad. It didn’t feel like a purgatory anymore. It felt like a trampoline.
And then Mummy got pulled into another business venture. This time with a man who promised to help her ship second-hand clothes from Michigan, but only if she sent him a few million Naira to get the gears moving.
I want to be as frank as possible here: When I was sent to the bank, I only felt giddiness. Relief. No one could deny I was an addict; hooked to death and craving my next fix. But this one was special. This was going to be an encore. A return, three years after my first death, to where it all began.
Except, I walked into the top-floor bathroom ready to jump, looked out and down in the last moments before leaping forward—out and down at the spot where I had first died—and found the splattered remains of my own corpse. Head cracked open, limbs bent, blood painted across the pavement.
It was all the things I’d felt at The End, laid out here as proof.
The body wore a striped-blue shirt and the same pants I currently had on as I looked down on myself. My dreadlocks… I couldn’t see them from that distance, but I knew they were probably still fresh. Everything about me was fresh: the still-wet blood, the colouring of my skin–so different from the greyish pallour and purplish patches one would expect in death. Some parts of me even looked alive; like my thighs, both still solid and held to bone and tendon, as if they could get up and walk away. Or my left fingers, curved as if prepared to wave. Even in death, I was unmoved by time.
Even in death, I was suffocating.
I didn’t jump. Again, that inhuman scream tore out another piece of me—I was getting emptier and emptier, with each new revelation. Again, I vomited till there was nothing left to vomit, and proceeded to retch until tears fell freely from my eyes. Again, a warm hand rested on my back, this time a security officer’s. He wasn’t as patient as Mummy, though.
“What happened?” He asked once, twice, three times.
I could not speak. I could only hum, and hum, and cry and hum. I was moving my body this way and that, never stopping, the concept of stillness—of quiet—suddenly gross and unnatural to me. I raised a weak, shaky hand, pointed at the window, and then pointed down.
He left my side for only a few seconds, presumably to look down, and then returned. “What is it, ma?” He asked once again. “What happened?”
I half expected, when I finally got the strength to stand and approach the window, that the body—my body—would be gone. But no, it was still there, and the sight made my knees give. He gripped my underarms to steady me as I pointed frantically. I pointed at it. I pointed at myself.
“Can’t you see it?” I asked, even though I knew he could not. “Can’t you see her? Can’t you see?”
He helped me call a taxi, and I returned home. Back to my bed, my slippers, my mirror and my dreadlocks. Back to my injured shoulder. Back to back, and back and back and back again, and… nothing ever seemed to matter, did it? Nothing mattered. I spent a few months in bed—four or twelve, I don’t know. It occurred to me that I didn’t have to move from where I was. I didn’t have to bathe, I didn’t have to poop, I didn’t even have to eat.
I started to think maybe I was dead. Maybe I had died in my sleep one day, and this was hell. Or maybe I was in a coma, strapped to a life-support machine, and this was my brain making sense of a senseless situation.
I am alone.
Jide is getting engaged soon, my mother has diabetes, the country has a new president, and a pandemic spread across the world. Everything is happening—everything is moving—except me. I don’t understand why. It doesn’t make any sense. It is cruel.
Jide’s birthday was approaching again, and Mummy asked me to order him a cake.
“Okay,” I said. “And what are we telling the baker?”
She sighed. “This girl… why do you keep forgetting your big brother’s age?”
And she was correct once again. Two years ago, Jide was 22, last year he was 23, and this year he is 24. Officially my older brother. I wasn’t upset about it; I had seen this one coming. I was just… curious, I suppose. Pensive.
* * *
This is how I find myself here, in the bushes off a long stretch of road leading into Ibadan. By the strong tree, looking up at myself.
I’ve been to every other spot—every cinema, every beach, every construction site—and found myself right where I had left me. Some were not so easy to find; some were lost at sea or lolling at the back seats of public buses I may never cross paths with again. But I remember them all, and I have kept a tally: 46 bodies. 46. Here, there, and everywhere; meaning nothing, having done nothing, the more recent ones just creatures born of habit. I found as many of them as I could, went to them, looked at them.
I look at me, all the versions of me, shot, bruised, poked, cut, poisoned, slashed, asphyxiated. I wonder what it all means. Nothing is too easy an answer. But easy doesn’t always mean wrong.
This—the second death—is the only one left. I saved it for last because of how far away from home it is. I don’t remember why I chose to do it this way; what possessed me to go all the way to Ibadan. I was so dramatic, in those early days.
Like the rest of them, this one is untouched by time. Her eyelids almost flutter, as though her mind is unsettled by the weight of my stare against her skin. But no—she is certainly dead. The little swings of her feet and the twitch of her fingers are an illusion in my head. I’ve spent enough time staring at my corpses to know how a restless mind can pour life into the dead. No, that is not a smirk on her lip. She is dead. She’s been dead for years.
I’m glad I mostly left myself in private places. I shudder to think of bodies like the first, sprawled by the side of a busy road or floating in some public pool. I hated going to those corpses, watching the way people interacted with them—with me. The way they would duck under, cross over, curve around like it brought the plague. As if they knew what they could not see. It made no sense. It drove me mad.
I cut down this one with the cutlass in my hand, and it thumps to the floor, head shaking no as if it doesn’t want to meet its inevitable fate. Well, that’s too bad. I’ve spent the last year retrieving and burning these things and thank god they burn. I’m not going to leave this one because it… well, because it looks the most alive out of almost any of them. Any moment I expect it to open its eyes and lunge at me. And that’s reason enough to destroy it. There can only be one of me walking around.
I fold myself into a large box and drag her behind me as I move. There is a bus stop an hour’s walk away, and the buses there will take us right home. The walk is slow, and I stop too frequently to listen. I think, maybe I can hear myself struggling inside that box. Maybe I have come to life again. It’s a fear that hangs weakly over me.
This is the final one. Number 46. I’ve started to think of them a bit like children. After all, I created them, and I can create more. They are born of my pain, my blood, my flesh. I take care of them. I could sit them on my dining table, talk to them, treat the prettier ones like dolls. God breathed life into man and called them His. I must be some sort of god, making death in my image, calling them mine. Whatever—I don’t know. All I know for certain is that I am no longer His.
But I have discovered something, the sort of thing you only discover after staring down dozens of deceased versions of yourself. After knowing so vividly every final moment of their lives. After feeling their wounds move as ghosts under your own skin. And it is this: I am not dead. I am so perpetually alive.
Pain is how I know this. Pulsing, searing, fiery pain spitting out at you like hot oil. Agonising pain, murderous pain. The pain at the end of the universe.
None of the other 46 know this pain. Only I do. And pain is what moves me. It is what contorts my body, throws me about, makes me dance like a puppet on strings. It is what draws me from fire, shrouds me from ice, pulls me out to air; protects me. And I don’t know why, but that must mean there is something worth protecting.
When you have died 46 times, and know you can die 46 and 46 more, the concept of pain becomes an option. Pain shouldn’t be an option. It should be potent and inescapable, a fear-invoking force so exquisite it turns your body into a machine made purely for its own survival. I have not felt that pain, that absolute pain, in so long. Many, many months, maybe. Years, maybe. Yet it is there, under the surface of my skin, ready to take control when I allow it. A humanising force.
I almost lost my pain. Almost buried it, suffocated it, left it to die. Then, I would have been the 47th.
When I round the corner and reach the bus stop, I am sweating all over. The sun is beating down heavily, and my breaths are short and painful. My right shoulder throbs under the weight of the box as I pull it behind me. My head aches from the exertion.
A man—one of the bus conductors—spots me and rushes over in an instant. He has clean white teeth and a strong jaw, with a scar splitting his lower lip into two uneven parts. He smiles at me with his odd mouth. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, madam,” he says. “To where?”
“Surulere,” I tell him.
He takes the box from me and stoops, for just a moment, under the weight. “Ah, madam,” he says again. “Wetin you put inside here?”
He doesn’t need or care about my answer, though. He just leads me to his bus and puts my box in the back. I give him my money and take a seat. He smiles again, and I smile back. I am suddenly dizzy with happiness.
I want to tell this man all about my quest. About how I am burning my last body. I want him to know that she’s sitting in that box, so life-like that I’m almost not sure. But when I burn her, I’ll know. Will she scream? Will she take off and run? No, probably not. She’ll sit and let the fire bathe her, while the smoke makes my lungs burn and my eyes water. Because I am alive, and she is not.
I don’t tell him any of this, though. If I do, his eyes will glaze over and his brain will shut like a flytrap. And that’s okay. We all have our secrets.
Mine just happens to be a thing out of place.
End.
