All at once.

I used mine when I was 5. The word ‘use’ is probably not a suitable way to describe how I wasted it, on an ice cream. I wasted it on an ice cream. I typically blame my parents; it is the easier thing to do. They taught me of it much too early, at an age when I hadn’t fully come to understand the concept of repercussions and barely understood the significance of what I had and what it meant to use it. I think the saddest part of the story was that I never actually used it.

Most studies show that the average human uses his/her one ‘time leap’ between the years of 11 and 24 with a vast majority of it being at the age of 16. Conclusions drawn suggest that this is the period when people are at the highest susceptibility to feelings of extreme embarrassment. Most people make the time leap to correct a wrong or avoid an awkward situation. I know of a few people who claim to have saved the life of a loved one using their time leap. My father is fond of telling the story of how he used his time leap to meet my mother. My mother insists that it never happened but the way I see her eyes soften, I know that she believes it did. My father talks about how he was sitting in a bus when he saw her standing by the road side, presumably waiting for a cab or something of the sort. He says that their eyes met and she smiled at him but his bus wasn’t stopping, it kept moving till they arrived at the next bus stop. There he came down and jumped on the first okada (commercial motorcycle) he found and rode to where she had been standing but by that time, she had gone from the spot.

“I was properly devastated when I didn’t find her. The type of sadness I felt reminded me of the first time I went off to boarding school.” My father said masking a type of regret in the tone he spoke with. He was not many things in the manner many fathers are in the eyes of their daughters but my father was a good teller of stories. He had a way of incorporating emotions in a way that the audience felt it. He was also a great impressionist and he did different voices for all the characters of his tales. I loved his stories when I was a child and didn’t need many reasons to love a person. As I out grew the age when stories amused me, I out grew the love I had for him.

“So there I was. Standing in the middle of the road with an okada man I couldn’t pay and no sight of my future wife.”

My mother and I sat in the silence left by my father who was of the habit of littering heavy silences in between his stories to add an effect of suspense. We listened with much attention as if we hadn’t heard the same story a hundred times before. In the moment, I couldn’t even remember what had led to this story being told again. By this time, my father used every opportunity he got to recount the details. It was the only thing he had that he was proud of (not even me). My mother let him have it and feigned amusement to make him happy. I feigned not being thoroughly exhausted to make my mother happy.

“So what did I do? I decided to travel back in time because you only meet the love of your life once”

“Except today” My mum said.

“Yes. Except today” My father said reflecting the smile on my mother’s face.

“We all know how the time leap works. I closed my eyes and found myself back in the bus as it was leaving the terminal. I remembered that I had spotted her about 10 minutes into the journey so I knew I had 10 minutes to find a plan.” He paused and my mum nodded her head to indicate that she understood the stakes.

“We also know that after one sentence is said in a time leap, you revert back to your current time, so I had to find a way of making the bus stop without saying anything so that I could use my one sentence when I got to my wife.”

My best friend growing up was Ifeoma. Ifeoma was perfect in the way that having her as a best friend did nothing but immense damage to my self-confidence. She was extremely eloquent and witty. She attracted all the eyes that looked over me. To them I was about as good as the bag Ifeoma carried around. I enjoyed Ifeoma because of the way she told her stories. They were always about her and she was always right and everyone was always jealous of her. She had a way of narrating her tales that enveloped you in the mental deposition that she wanted for you. I couldn’t think for myself till I had left her and then I would realise that the beggar she had kicked was probably not cursing her with his eyes, at least not until after the kick.

The day Ifeoma used her time leap, I knew of it. I was lurking on the corridor of our class block when she walked up to me.

“I am looking for Andi and…” she said

“And what?” I asked

“have you seen him and…”

The realisation of what she was doing hit me quickly. Ifeoma was the kind to find a way to outsmart the time leap condition.

“I haven’t seen him”

“follow me to find him and…” she said.

I remember walking with her and wondering to myself how she had thought of such a wise thing. Had she known that it would work? How long was she going to keep it up for? Did she share the hack with anyone? I never asked her and she never told me. When we found Andi, she grabbed his arm and pulled him with her to somewhere behind school popularly called ‘the kisser’s lair’. I didn’t need to ask her what happened next and she didn’t tell me. It was around this same period that her storytelling began to waver and I lost interest in her. We stayed friends after secondary school but only the type of friends that called on birthdays and started every conversation with ‘Omg it’s been so long. You just abandoned me.’

I am one of those children that fell off the right path in my late teens. My father can attest to it. The story of my descent starts with me struggling in school before deciding that this wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I did not want to be a doctor, then I did not want to be a microbiologist then I did not want to be a student then I did not want to be a Christian then I did not want to be a daughter to a jobless man. The story didn’t happen as linearly as I have made it seem. Many times before giving up on everything, I would be at a point where my time leap would have been most useful if I hadn’t used it when I was 5 on an ice cream. I used it on a stupid ice cream. I often lied to people about how I used my time leap; sometimes I said I used it to save my younger sister’s life by stopping her from crossing the road, sometimes I was the one that needed the saving. Sometimes I used it to hide from someone and other times I used it to pass an exam. This was the one that eventually stuck.

The first person I told the real story to was my husband, Timilehin. By the time I met Timi, I had lost all interest in listening to other people’s stories and all for the better because Timi was mute. He didn’t say a word. It was at the cinema that we first met. I had been sitting at a table waiting for my movie to start. I was just from a fight with my father and my eyes were still wet with tears but I had a sunshade on. Timi came to where I was sitting and took the chair opposite me then he sat staring at me and I stared back. When I spoke, my voice was terribly shaky,

“Do you want to hear a story?” I asked and Timi nodded his head.

“It’s about how I used my time leap” I said and left a small pause. The type of pauses that marked the beginning of a story the way my father told them.

“I was 5 and my mother had just bought me a cone of ice cream. I was outside the house. Enjoying my chocolate chip vanilla ice cream when the disastrous happened” Timi opened his mouth and covered it with his palms pretending to show horror.

“Yes.” I said “the ice cream fell.” Timi shook his head vigorously pretending to show disbelief.

“So there I was, crying over spilled ice cream when I remembered what my mother had told me one afternoon. She said that if I thought about a moment that happened and closed my eyes and I really wanted to go back I would go back. “ Timi’s mouth opened to form an o and his eyes widened as he pretended to show hope.

“So I stopped crying and I closed my eyes and found myself holding my ice cream.” I paused as if the story had ended but Timi didn’t show any emotions. He looked at me waiting for the punchline

“Overwhelmed with happiness to see that it worked, I exclaimed excitedly. I can’t remember what it was I said but next thing I knew I had reverted to the moment after my ice cream had fallen and I was on the floor crying” Timi burst out into laughter and I laughed with him. When we both caught our breaths I asked him if he had used his own time leap and he nodded after briefly hesitating.

“You aren’t a man of many words, are you?” I asked and he shook his head.

“I like you” I said.

I told many stories to Timi after that day and he listened to them in the same manner. Most of the stories weren’t my own, they were stories that my father had told me or that Ifeoma had told me or that I had gotten from many other random people about their time leaps. I became obsessed with time leaps and asked every new person I met about how they used theirs. Disappointingly, most of the stories were underwhelming. Many people used their time leaps to do childish things like getting away with stealing meat from the pot or spying on someone’s work during an exam or trying to prepare for an interview. I met someone that used his time leap to win the lottery and a few people that used it to do other big gambles. One guy used it to decide whether to invest all his life savings on a new tech company. He didn’t, the company died before it could start making any profit. Of all the stories that I heard, my father’s story about how he met my mother was still my favourite and I told it to Timi sometime during our third year of marriage.

“So there he was in the bus and he had just sighted my mother again but he couldn’t speak so he started to hit the roof of the bus and make incomprehensible sounds like a deaf and dumb” Timi looked at me in silence much in the same way I had looked at my father.

“’I noticed commotion coming from a danfo bus on the other side of the road’ my mother usually added to the story. Then she saw the man she had just locked eyes with come down and very clumsily cross the road and then walk up to where she was standing. He stopped a few feet in front of her and smiled childishly then said she was worth it.”

I can’t say that there was any love between me and Timi before we got married and there wasn’t particularly much more when we became wife and husband. He made sense at the time and we were compatible. I liked the way he listened to my stories and I didn’t need much more than that. He seemed totally engrossed by me and I liked this too. He seldom took his eyes of me when we were together and l liked this too. I didn’t like everything about him; many times I wished he could talk so he could tell me stories as well. When I got older and couldn’t take the silence anymore, I started to go to places where it was easy to find other people with stories. Sometimes I got other things too.

I didn’t divorce Timi because we didn’t love each other. I divorced him when I found out about his selfishness. It wasn’t immediately that the divorce happened. There was time for me to start to hate seeing his face and for me to consider if I could forgive him. At the end, I had run out of stories and the interest to tell stories and he had refused to talk to me. It was on a day like many others after he had saved my life that I found out Timi had been using his time leap throughout the period we had been together, it was why he didn’t talk. He had said his reason was that he wanted to experience me again and I had lost my cool in a long rant about how he had robbed me of the opportunity of experiencing him at all. I ranted about selfishness and about other things that didn’t apply to the situation. When I was done ranting, I asked if he would talk now and he shook his head. On the day we signed the divorce papers, I asked him if we had gotten divorce in his first experience and he nodded and informed me that he had been the one to file for the divorce then.

I was thirty and I didn’t have a father or a husband and I thought of what I would do with my time leap if I still had it. After many moments, spanning over several days, of considering it, I realized that I didn’t have anything I’d travel back in time to do. The reason wasn’t that there was too much to change but that I didn’t particularly hate anything enough to hope it had happened better so perhaps it was good that I never got to have my chocolate chip vanilla ice cream. Stupid ice cream.

When six months had passed and the emptiness of being single began to get to me, I started a blog where I posted the time leap stories I had gathered over the years. The blog gained more attention than I had anticipated; enough attention to convince me to write a book. The day the book was released was the last day I saw Timi alive. I was sitting at home that morning staring at the mirror, unable to wipe away the thought of him so I invited him for lunch.

At lunch, we sat and we stared at each other and he still didn’t speak. I asked him how long he was going to keep it up and he said he didn’t know. I told him that I needed to hear what he sounded like and narrated to him what Ifeoma had done during her time leap. I asked him if he thought he could keep that up for as long as he wanted to keep living in his past.

“It can’t be that much harder than not talking” I said.

“No it can’t be and…” he said after five minutes of thinking in silence. His voice was nothing like I had expected. It was deep in a way that it didn’t touch all of his words and he had an awkward accent that I assumed was as a result of him not having spoken in so long. Before I could say anything he spoke again.

“I am not living in my past. I am living to avoid dying and…” He said. It took me to a few seconds to realise what he meant.

“Cancer?” I asked and he nodded.

“How long?”

“probably ten months and” He said and then there was silence between us. When I finally opened my mouth to talk, he interrupted me. “don’t say sorry and I have lived almost twice as long as I was supposed to and there is nothing to be sorry for and…”

“Did I write a book in your first experience?” I asked and he nodded. “Was it successful?”

He looked at me for some time but he didn’t reply.

“Am I happy? “ I asked.

“i don’t know, we don’t talk again after today and”

Then we spent the rest of the afternoon in silence eating our lunch. When we were done and he stood over me at the door of my car, I asked him what the last thing he ever said to me was. He stared at me for what felt longer than a few moments before he spoke again.

“you only meet the love of your life twice”

He didn’t say “and” and I didn’t think he meant to.