Of Memories and Nothing
Nothing was formed in you at the beginning except the indecision that opened its teeth on your path to living, on your road to being a corps member. Being a corps member could mean you were living a solely life without the happiness of friends and families and travelling far, into the remote villages of Nigeria, or perhaps, into the cities made of sand and roads made of granites. As you travelled through these cities and villages, the rocks, the hills, the weather, the ridges and the short grasses in the August rain would touch your heart. And your heart would skip a bit like a child’s heart, and really, there would be no definition for what you have seen. This is the short memory you had in the beginning…
 The formations of these beginnings sooner turned into the sublime of bombs and the fear of death knocking at your door. First, it came to you as a long headache which you thought was nothing, and then, it moved from there to malaria, and then, to other things which you could not describe. Fear became the definition of your stay without a family. As days began to change into weeks, and then, weeks began to transform into months, you felt the niche to rise up to something but in the end you rose up to nothing. And you fear everything.
When the rain began really hard in August, you felt that was it, but intense cold knocked you off the pedal of your bicycle, and you said it was only a slip, you blamed it on the bad road. But roads were always bad. Whether in rain or out of rainy season, the roads were the same. 
Walking down the barracks roads one day, you saw the tragedy of family life and the is-it-by-force-to-get-married syndrome coming out of one of the blocks in the barracks but you continued walking down the road though your brain and your spirit were standing as uninvited spectators as the ugly drama unfolded in sheer comedy. It was a Sunday morning and you had to get to church very early. Whatever the case, you knew the woman was putting on a wrapper just above her chest and you could see some stretch marks along the lower part of her chest, just before her breast’s region; the man was in a soldier’s khaki uniform, perhaps too, ready to keep his duty post, for he was struggling to put on his belt even as the drama continued. You also knew that from their depositions, they really had a nice night like the one that happens on a daily basis in your neighbour’s room every night, when the bed begins to make some creaking sounds and the voices rise in sexual ecstasy, and in all of it, you remained mute unable to sleep and unable to see. Yet nobody minded them, maybe neigbours were already used to it and it was not a new news.
You walked through the roads though, amidst the noisy children, in wonders, in acute pains in your stomach, and then, in shameless runs, here and there, of ladies clinging hard to sperms as if that was the only thing that matters in life. Perhaps it is, you think. 
Here, in the barracks, you began to have a blurry notion of artificiality mixed with the superfluity of unreasonable living. There are only three things that make any sense. They are: wars, wines and women—“the three Ws”. Now that we can hardly talk of war except for the Boko Harem insurgency, you knew you were left with “two Ws”. And they maximized themselves to the fullest. You knew those things that happened in the ratings’ and the officers’ messes; you were not prepared to see the horror, you only walked by. But your church service was a minute walk away and you could hear the voice of the church choir singing the opening hymn already. You didn’t run. You walked in counting seconds but you ended up counting one hundred and twenty seconds.
Suddenly, your rain stopped after a heavy raindrops. Your raindrops grew into a pool of flood and rivers became a sea of disastrous monster flooding the maize plantation on the thin lines of the river basin. And nothing much was left but ruins. Just before the rains finally stopped, you wished it continued in mighty dews. But when you wanted it most, it stopped like your girlfriend.