The Intricacy of Life

I have often viewed life as a delusion. Sort of like a voyage, where the Captain searches for the desired bearing in the midst of a vast, shapeless and directionless ocean, in other to reach his destination. But unlike a voyage –where the destination is predetermined, where a couple of Captains have trodden the same path before you, and where you can usually employ the help of a technology to give you accurate directions –I see life has the opposite. It has no destination, no technology to direct your path, no sailor who has trodden the same path before you. Life is a delusional and an endless journey filled with the constant search for happiness, or something which never exist anywhere. Like a mirage on a hot sunny day, you only realize it is an illusion when you are closest, but at a distance it appears to be tangible. It is like switching bodies with a person, only to realize in the end that yours was the best and you are doomed.

First, it was Joe. A 12-year-old, whose parents had just arrived from Europe to start a not-for-profit water project in our community. Joe was very tall and fat, with strange bodily features a boy at his age wouldn’t normally possess. For instance, his shoe size was the same as his father’s and he wore the same cloth size as his father too. And he spoke like he was whispering, such that one would strain his ears in other to hear him. We had very similar interests and hobbies. We both loved football, we loved to watch the television while eating, and we were both very good at math too. But the one thing that identified us most, was the fact that we were both been raised by single parents. Unlike my other friends before him, Joe was a giver. He didn’t bother giving me his whole launch box. Or waiting till I visited in the night before he brought out his supper in front of the TV.

My dad was a long vehicle driver. And for some reason, he resembled Oscar, Joe’s father, in many ways. Except that, Dad’s complexion was a little fairer than the white man. And they too, just like Joe and I, identified themselves as people who didn’t have wives. They were both proud and arrogant too. I suppose the reason their wives left them.

The arrival of Oscar and Joshua in Dagmweo was the beginning of my serendipity. My dad quickly recovered from the depression that bugged him in bed after mother left, within days of encounter with Oscar. He was employed as Oscar’s driver, and the person in charge of logistics, in the water project Oscar was working on. And then I got to play with Joe all the time. And for the first time, dad didn’t bother leaving me behind for work. Life was good, except that dad missed mum and often had his head buried in long hours, anytime he woke up in the morning. The very reason I always wanted him to stay with Oscar, because such behavior made me sad too.

I now spend my entire days with Joe and sometimes we spent the night in bed together, especially Friday nights. We would eat from the same plate in front of the TV, after the housemaid had finished cooking. And then we would sit arm’s length and watch the Dany Dibblebit’s 6 o’clock Young Teens Show. Then we would play chess, with sips of “Coolaid” in his fully air-conditioned room afterwards — Joe’s favorite. For an ordinary day, like the weekdays when Joe’s father was still figuring out which grade school to enroll him in, we would visit the water project site after I returned from school. Those days were the best. We would get to eat launch in four, listening to them speak about the success of the project, and how the whole community of Dagmweo would get access to clean drinking water when it was successful. And then we will later play chess and Super Mario in Joe’s red mini Asus brand new laptop. Life was good, at least, dad said that the other day, and I totally believed him. He received very good salary now, and he believed he was also involved in something that would save his own community. Just the other day, when he collected his salary, he came home with very good news. Oscar was going to enroll Joe and I in the same school, Victory Academy, one of the best elementary schools in the town of Bolgatanga, a suburb of Dagmweo. I was happy.

And so, the days went by. Oscar would have dad send us and pick us back together after school. We now did our homework together. And Oscar had a personal tutor to take us through extra class, later in the evenings.

The first time, I wanted to speak like Joe. I have always admired his American accent ever since, but never bothered to speak like him. But I guess the feeling came after the mentoring program was held at the school premises. When Teacher Charles said that, we should each pick someone we would like to be when we grow up. I quickly said I wanted to be like Oscar. And then later in the one-on-one session he told me, “you can only succeed in life, when you find someone who you want to be like and tries to copy what he did when he was at your age”. The first day in the mentoring class, he told us to come the following day with the name of one person we would like to be when we grow up. Joe came with the name of Albert Einstein and told me to use the name of Isaac Newton and I did. In the subsequent session, he told us to come with five things those people did when they were young. At the end of the six weeks long mentoring program, I was indoctrinated. Life seemed easy now. Instead of working myself out in trying to figure out what I wanted to be, or do, I just needed to find a successful person and imitate what he did. How easy!

I guess that was why I wanted to speak like Joe, or even be like him. I wanted to eat like him, write like him and I wished I knew a lot of things like he did. For the first time in my entire life, I wished I could switch bodies with Joe. I cursed my own body because Joe was good at a lot of things and I knew little. He knew how to play a lot of video games, and read comics. And he had many girlfriends in school too. Then I wanted to be like Teacher Charles, who spoke like an ancient philosopher, and then I wanted to be like Oscar. It was by now a regular habit. I wanted to be like the great people I read in my science class. Like the Christiaan Bernard, who was the first to perform a heart transplant in the world, like Aristotle who discovered classification, and like Newton who discovered calculus and gravity. I would search through their biographies to discover what they did and then I would force myself to do them. The other day, I bought a pair of cloths after watching my favorite series. Then I decided to eat and act like a character in a Disney film which I found very interesting. Life was now becoming unbearable. A constant search for something I didn’t know what it was. I lived many lives each year, sort of like a business man constantly searching for a workable business model to scale, and only to realize it is not scalable after he has found it.

I suffered from a constant depression during high school. I went to class dressed like other students and still wrote like Joe. I suffered from inferiority complex too, and visited the guidance and counseling department often. I was disappointed that, after long years of searching to become like the best people, I only became worse. I never felt I could live in my own self again. That self was gone now. I never recognized myself anymore. I could only now tell how I ate like Oscar, wrote in Joe’s handwriting and dressed to class like the school’s senior prefect.

At college, I was now on a medication. I visited the school’s clinic for anxiety check. The therapist told me to come every other day for checkup. The guidance and counseling coordinator visited me every day before going home. And before I completed college, I had my first attack. It was stroke. And the second attack came on my graduation day.

I have lived a thousand lives, and I have only realized that I have not lived. But I guess that’s what life is about –the ghostly chase that only ends when you are no more.