The rain is at its peak. As a living being whose source of income depends greatly on this mad, sometimes infuriating and unpredictable weather, I might as well want to consider taking some extra lessons at weather forecasting. But I don't. Instead, I just discover that the gift of weather-reading naturally springs up on its own like the lean yam tuber that chooses to grow inspite of the leaking pipe soaking it daily underneath my kitchen sink. The one that I ought to have trashed after many months of steadily cooking and eating its brethren in a feast of canal engbadument. I just left it there alone and abandoned like a bad road sign down at Upper. Although for no reason, I let its meandering green leaves spread itself across the kitchen floor like it is some sort of an ornamental plant. Obviously, I've got some plans for it.

I operate a laundromat from the comfort of my one-room apartment. A service I render almost daily without the use of any modern day washing gadget. Luckily, I didn't have to rent up a space for the business. I only have to seek permission from the caretaker and convert my bedsitter apartment into my work space. One I had lived in since my undergraduate days and so you can see why naturally, it should occur to me to always think that I can predict the weather by merely gazing up at the changing clouds, not necessarily by applying some magic. I am not a descendant of any rainmaker if you'd asked me. No. I merely use my number-six and that's all.

Besides, you can't be such a stand-alone, do-it-all and not know how to imbibe some certain attributes. Let's just say it hurts pretty much to finish scrubbing people's clothes with your bare hands and watch them get drenched by the rain. Plus in this environment where I reside, once it rained, it means there wouldn't be a flash of power supply until at least after a day, two or more depending on when the electrical wires get dried and you know what that means for my kind of business especially when I have to deliver on time. Nothing beats that kind of misery and raw frustration. So I’lI basically take that as a sixth or seventh sense or whatever the case may be and then sometimes too, I like to assail God with my selfish petitions in order to tell him to also apply common sense whenever he chooses to flood the earth.

I live in this small bungalow in a relatively bubbling city in Edo State, co-rented with other tenants who like me have taken weak solace in the poor ventilation system like prisoners. Nobody knows anybody down here (at least those with whom I shared such felicitations have all moved out); the rest of us now are mere human animals used to fulfilling the order of the homosapien’s breakthrough, if not a relationship breakdown in living and satisfying the unkind wishes of a god from the slums. So ultimately, I cannot tell if I too want so badly as to bother myself with learning anybody back. I am like that faulty traffic light at Ekpan Junction in Delta State that doesn't like to come or go so I am convinced that being static, stationary like a planetary body will do me a lot of good. I awake, I eat, I sleep and complete the circle every other day. It's like a curse and so it goes on and on.

It doesn't mean that I am vision less. As a matter of fact, being a person who has seen so much shege in life, I have quite a number of dreams that I would love so much as to be fulfilled before I vaporized. One of it, is to know what it tastes like to be really, really free. Even though I am not a prisoner in the literal sense, but I feel almost incarcerated by everything in life. So I have simply embraced the idea of contentment instead. After all, I am also that simple lady who sometimes entertain simple wayfarers who think that my body is a gift shop where each must come to buy love's merchandise but usually don't even like to stay the day's light. I have taken solace in that misfortune one too many times and I have thrown in the towel on happiness. For pain and pleasure are one and the same.

Guess what? To find out the truth about these parallels, one must give oneself the gustatory pleasures of browsing through a cookbook, salivate over meals you can't afford and afterwards sprain your ankle by mistake. Your moaning phonemes are never far apart particularly if they were suppressed hitherto. I have had the sole pleasure of knowing both extremes but what can I say? I think that maybe one day, I’ll win this cold, uneventful warfare of status quo and social glam.

I am a believer of everything good that is to come. So I have decided to move on to experimenting with rigour and singleness, singleness of purpose, singleness of the spirit, soul and body —the theory of being trapped or it is intentionality with aloofness? Call it whatever you please because the sad truth is that I live an abject broke life. Not that I was given the choice to choose between binaries —penury and affluence in any way. It was kinda inherited from Grandpa and Grandma Bubu who were just as penniless fulfilling the hideous terms of brokeness themselves. Theirs was so evident that one could actually trace their geneology of poverty through the contours of our family linage. Father poor, mother poor kinda thing. But guess what? We are no indolent folks. One can actually bet on that! We're rich in our laborious trades: fishing, farming and woodcutting. You should have really seen us back then making a living out of the mangrove marshes, our coconut plantations and salt water creeks. Agile, dedicated, happy folks.

At least, our hands could attest to these. Our bodies too. My veiny hands like cobwebs know suffering and rigour too well. My kind heart has kept me alive and I have trained my body to respond in ways that make osmosis another freaking reality. I always tell my body to wait for God's time that is the best. Didn't my pastor tell the congregation just Sunday last week that we can all be right-handed on both hands? And he quite explained his theology beautifully with lustrous images from the scriptures. So, my hands, they're strong. They are my faithful witnesses! They bear solid witness to the fact that I live from hands-to-mouth, attesting to the painful reality of my family's impoverishness till date, our dogged hustling, the subtlety in conniving schemes (sometimes) with hardship and the subversive tendencies in trying to escape the subaltern life. My hands can draw up every detail so you can see how I like to pride myself always in such pristine acts, do you not see?

But well, some days are as oddly. For instance, I might beg today for bread from the blessed ones. Tell them a moving tale to bestir their hearts towards helping me and then I can go pay a visit some other days to the foodstuff seller thirteen houses away in order to buy life for my rumbling stomach. But why thirteen houses away for just refuelling of the ungrateful stomach? Such an infinite pit hole when I could have simply engaged the neighbours next door to help me subdue the worms that are biting hard against the wall of my tummy with maybe a cup of garri or rice? No. I'd rather die hungry than be exposed at such great peril to what end if I may ask? For some stomach relief? Nah.

So I will walk that long, lonely walk to hide my shame and beg the foodstuffs seller to sell me something cheap and easy to prepare on I.O.U (I owe you). So again you see, she will then pour me a single cup of garri with a single cup of beans upon my additional request cause I don't like to exceed an expectation and then she would tell me not to keep her coffers empty for long. Meaning…never mind. I am not a chronic debtor but when I do owe, I pay back only by the grace of God. And just so you know it isn't intentional. I just struggle with the basic things of life. So I will only make her a promise by nodding my head agreeing to pay back as soon I could, although embarrassed by her emphasis on dates and deadlines in front of the other buyers. Then when I might have vanished from the shop and back to my hellish abode, cooked by the radiation of heat from the angry sun, I will do a quick selection of the brown beans over a big pot lid and fall upon one or two white corn seeds that I will set aside for the present planting season. A farmer born out of necessity one might say.

Yes, necessities beget creativity and creativity, the creator. Indeed, sapa has shown me pepper but thus far has also spurred me into entering many trades, some good, some not so good depending on people's perception. The idea of growth as a form of victory when in actual sense, it's an act of continuity is like an opium. So growing these maize seeds has encouraged me to want hard to live, breathe and grow while feeling like a reborn. Against all odds, the rocky earth upon which I have introduced all three of them like siamese triplets bearing hard against one another, the earth judging them of being too content, too stunted in progress when they could have actually blossomed under normal circumstances. But in actualsense, this could be the patronizing voice of my immoral secondary school proprietor who would constantly tell me that I am such a rare star, an idea to be nurtured, that I could actually be flourishing under his matrimonial ambit but if only I would let him see me, then he would show me the way up… “Up to the pinnacle of my greatness”. Indeed, no one needs to search for a black cat at night. I've seen this face before one too many, and he wears his lustful desires without shame.

My plants. Oh my plants! I'm back to the spot of life and nourishment, to oversee their adept progress, their progress through germination. I pick up a jar full of water and drown the sprouts in such great deluge thinking that to be, one must. So I will smile at the tender shoots and quietly muse “heaven helps those who say amen”.

Indeed, I've said a few too many. Yesterday, I mouthed similar creeds and five years ago it was answered when I decided to migrate to this side of the world. I wanted to be something more at thirty. I got an admission to further my studies into a university. A university for God's sake! Can you beat that? Me, a university student? Incredible but it was real. My biggest dream of all times at the time. The very first in my line to attain such tremendous feat. Like what? Say a family of retards? God abeg o. Undoubtedly, it was humiliating getting a first degree at thirty years of age but on the brighter side, I was equally hopeful. It meant one thing — that I wasn't cursed as I and the folks around me had thought.

And so whenever I think that I am never ungrateful to say the least, I equally try to change that kind of mindset. And frankly speaking, I do not hesitate to let my pillows drink from my cups of ingratitude, to get them wet and well acquainted with the idea that lateness is actually not being late as I let them know through the doleful songs that I pour at night. I will cry them the rivers from my breaking heart and my nose will trumpet the sad effect. And then I want to stop short at nothing just to do the gratitude dance back in church. But gratitude is not for the ungrateful. Is it? I am nothing like my single mother of nine, an epitome of gratitude, born to appreciate everyone and everything even for the tiniest details. She has seen evil too like me. She has seen dearth as well but yet what can she do rather than throw herself in, into the arms of thankfulness? What can I say Lord? A hypocrite is a hypocrite, today I recall my blessings, tomorrow I am interrogating the One who says I subsist. So who do I think I am to still be alive when I've actually walked the sad and lonely places where sadness should never have grown?

Well, I have contemplated sacrifice; sacrifice as in the washing away of life like sins, the most merciful ways of surrender and being blown out like a candle by hook or by liquids. Who am I not to be still? To persevere and see the end of this horrible road? I take a peek at my little greenish garden right there. Stunted but yet green —a little discoloration here and there no doubt but they strive. The corns are fighting real hard for their lives —blighted by disease and starvation just like me, the gardener by circumstance. But surely, they'll arise like the sun on a rainy day, crippled maybe but they'll rise. They'll produce if nothing at all good memories of the times being sunken firmly into the rocky bed of sand and humus, my efforts in reviving lost hope in them. Where is my own mustard like faith oh ye of little faith?

I probably want to go over this again? Nights— the blackest part of day but equals the day’s brightness. It sees every process: the groans, the wailing, and the waiting, the breakdowns and the mended places. And like everything else, it too is slippery and so it too will pass away. Certainty —a state of zero doubts propagated over hopes and determination both within and without. It will take slow turns in undoing my unbeliefs I know. But have I realized what is truly amiss yet? A branch and a renaming perhaps. A branch and a renaming by virtue of legalities? Does the world even think that these two can piece up my broken life together? For marriage is the least thing on my mind right now. Not that I don't hate the idea. To be honest, I dream daily of the forever after mileage but how can one go into a farmland unprepared? Now the world knows my dilemmas.

For I have checked for the loopholes, the faults. I have searched deep within. Looked at the archives for betrayals. What do people call a warzone? A territory marked off for causing havoc eh? But then again, something must have hindered my annihilation? My single fallout with love or fate? It can't possibly be both for one has to take the blame and I am thinking fate. For fate is the sole artist, all-knowing that can draw up destinies and painfully paint up destinations. It alone single-handedly picked mine, and gave me a recourse on my existence so it can put my life back on a steady, slow and painfully transformative journey and make blind guesses out of life. At this stage in life, what is the expectations of people when I tell them that I'm still single at thirty seven?

“The devil's hand work”, they'd say.
“Are you seeing enough of the men folks?”
“When are you bringing him home?”
“Are you sure it's not a spiritual problem?”
“You must tell yourself the truth!”

And yes, sincerely I want to do that. Some days, I honestly want to scream at everybody else to leave me the hell alone cause they don't understand what it means to be at war —to be at war with oneself. But I think that life itself owes me that —an apology. So I want to scream at life to bring it all back, the old, simple me not knowing what it'll cost the universe. Did I even know what I am busy clamouring for? A hashtag for another lost soul? Hashtag for a princess in distress? Hashtag for the old virgin, the crossed one? Shut it now child! My senses will scold me. Be focused, remember the singleness paradigms. You want meaning to your life! Don't you now? So go on up straight to the root of the cause. Shout at the gods and good luck with that fatal adventure.

So, I go back again to my experimental garden. The corns are no longer standing. Life has beaten down upon them, broken them in nameless ways, sun-dried by so much pain. At least they've lived. Like me, they can say that they too came, saw but on their behalf, I shall be conquering. And so come next planting season, another triplets will be inseminated in their stead and maybe, just maybe I too will be alive to gather another relatable experience. For what even is an experience if not a boast about the past? The future is the real deal but it appears that the future itself is a weird scare. So I can actually go two steps backward, one step either ways like a drunk. Call me a deviant, but I thought I did say from the very start, that this is nothing but a personal lesson from the singleness-theorem.

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