Some Nights
When she looked up, she saw an elliptical shadow formed on the pale-looking ceiling of her room. The ceiling, originally white, was now grayed out by the darkness of the night. She did not know what it was when she first saw it, but then she glanced across the room, and then saw that it was the shadow of the plate she had just had some biscuit from. She did not even finish them. The last piece she had bitten into was still on the plate, half bitten with crumbles from the bite carefully decorating one side of the plate.
From where the plate lay on her work chair — on the other side of her work table, it cast a shadow on the ceiling. The power extension board that She uses to extend electric power from the wall plug on the other side of the room to her work table had a red indicator light. It also cast a red coloured shadow on the ceiling which sat right on the edge of the plate’s shadow. It all looked like an onion ring with ketchup on its edge.
Fun’s “carry on” music — released somewhere in 2012 on the album: ‘some nights’ — was blasting in her left ear. The right ear speaker of her almost six months old earphones had broken but she kept using it anyways. She used it particularly for bed, when she needed to listen to some music before sleeping, and for public transport when she was commuting and didn’t want to listen to all the noise that ensued from the conversations of the many people on the bus. The music was actually raising her spirits.
She was having a rough night.
For most young people, a rough night meant being out somewhere on the streets getting into a fight or struggling to get home after having too much to drink at a party, or something other than that of the mind. But for Emelia, it was a rough night of the mind — a struggle, so to speak. She had just finished meditating — as if that would have brought her some peace. But it did not.
Regardless, there was some comfort at least. Her comfy brown teddy bear: Joe had hugged her so tight she felt like a child all over again. And the somewhat five years old ceiling fan she had had fixed that morning — though made a squeaky noise on each turn of its blades — was circulating a good amount of air and it kept her cool.
But her head was hurting. She could feel the throbbing all the way down her belly. If she could, she would trade clinging on to a hot cooking pan for the pain of the headache she felt that moment. She would not think twice about it.
Her mind was just not at peace. She felt purposeless. Or otherwise, too much purpose that she wasn’t sure she could achieve. In all that chaos, as if it all was not enough, her mind just wouldn’t get off one thing. All she could think at that moment was how she would get another job to help her earn more money to improve her life and that of her kids. She wanted to save up some money to try and get into college because she had come to accept that education was needed for any success in today’s world.
Send the CV. Send the CV. Her mind kept repeating to her. She knew she and her husband were not going to be able to take care of their two kids with just the farm. And so she came up with the belief that if she could just take on much more work, she could help out the family. Now, the many things she wanted to take up scared her even before she would plunge into doing them. Open the shop. Open the shop. And, Clear the farm.
Then, like a prisoner granted probation, her mind wandered for a moment and she thought about money. “Well, maybe if we had more money than we needed, I would not be having this turmoil within. But money doesn’t solve everything, as Maama used to say. Hmm. What would I do?”. Her mind floated to her grandmother, whom she loved to call Maama. (Not mama for mum or mother, but ‘maama’ for ‘old lady’ as the Ewe’s of Ghana call older women).
“Could I be getting depressed? Or mad even? I remember when Maama started to get confused and she would walk about town all day not knowing the way back home. And Dada (for mum by the Ewe’s of Ghana) would go looking for her throughout the evening until she found her just before dark. Papa would not even bother because Maama was not her mother. He didn’t feel like he needed to participate in the responsibility of taking care of her not even to the extent of finding her when she went missing. In fact, he would get angry that Dada had delayed his evening meal because she went looking for Maama.”
“Could I be getting Maama’s sickness too? Maybe it is hereditary. Ahh I have issues”. She thought to herself. “Why can’t I bring my mind to peace?” She rolled over from one side to the other on the bed and her mouth kissed the sheets. She thought back to the times her friends would call her “Brainy”. “Smart people always have these kinds of issues”, She could remember her friend, Patt, say when they were in basic school and she had been tricked by a beggar on the street into giving all her pocket money away. “Wait, am I smart to the extent of losing it? No I can’t be”. She tried to bring herself to disagree.
“If only I could just sleep, tomorrow would be a better day.” For many nights like that night, she had always hoped she could just speak to somebody who didn’t know anything about her and just had a plain conversation without a past to judge or a judge of a person sitting across the other side of the phone or table.
She just needed to talk to someone. She picked up her phone and started scrolling through her contact list. Her phone’s battery was almost dead. As she looked, it dropped a percent. Her phone’s battery was now at eighteen percent and Fun’s ‘carry on’ was still blasting in her left ear.
The music and the squeaky fan together with the sound of its moving air kept the silence of the night away. She wanted to call Kwesi, but she knew He wouldn’t pick up. Moreover, she did not want him thinking in his head that she could not sleep because of him. “That ego of his” she thought to herself with an almost disappointing shrug. She dropped the phone. Then she picked it up again. She scrolled her contact list and still couldn’t find anyone she was ready to call.
She opened Instagram, scrolled through a few images of models and food. Then, like the falling of rain without warning, her mind was ceased again. Send the CV. Open the shop. Clear the farm…
The thought started repeating again. This time so forcefully, she started whispering it. Her mind was fixated on these words and she just couldn’t stop repeating them under her breath. She was a true zombie at that point.
Unable to beat the pressure any longer she started screaming and jumped to her feet. Joe the teddy bear had fallen to the ground and was face down to the floor. She circled around the room and eventually sat on the floor holding her head between her two palms and rocking herself in the fashion of a rocking chair. She kept repeating her fixated thought, gradually raising her voice.
Her eldest son, Johnny, was fast asleep beside her on the bed when all these was happening. Most surprisingly, he never woke up despite the high reaching voice of his mother. Johnny’s younger brother, Kobby, who had been laid to sleep a bit farther from Emelia, woke up. And all the time Emelia was jumping in and out of her trance, little Kobby was crying out loud and She heard none of it.
She held onto her hair, pulling hard as if She intentionally wanted to pull them out, as if it was the antidote to her fears that night. In all her pulling, she did not even notice when she pulled the earphones from her phone and the music had started playing out loud, joining in with little Kobby’s crying. She had pulled so hard that even the working right speaker of the earphone also got broken. The exposed wires were tickling her neck where they had fallen to rest and she creased them off with the back of her hand. She creased so angrily as if they were another of her menaces.
The room was almost the same as the regular chaos of a public bus at this point. It echoed into a crescendo of fun’s carry on, Kobby’s crying and Emelia’s confused shouting. And it had become so harmonious, Emelia was lost in it. It felt like ‘perfect’. Nothing needed to change, and her mind was not coming back any time soon.
Then there was a knock on the door. The lady next door was alarmed by the noise emerging from Emelia’s room. She knocked lightly at the door so as not to appear rude if eventually there was no issue.
But, upon drowning into the noise and hearing each distinct voice in the melody of the chaos, she began to bang on the door. Emelia was so far gone at that point she couldn’t come to the door. And Johnny — like a formula one racing car — had just pulled out from third gear into the fourth and was racing down the last turn at Daytona.
Sheila rushed into her room when it appeared no one was going to respond to her knocking. She grabbed Emelia’s spare keys that she had left with her for a while now and tried the door with them. On the other end of the door Emelia’s keys were still in the key hole so there was no way the doors were going to open. But Sheila kept turning until She heard the clanking of keys on the other end and she knew she was in. Emelia’s keys had fallen out and she could now open the door. She turned the keys right, and right again. Then she flung the door open and before her sat her neighbour and her children in a mess, in madness, in so much pain, sadly.
