POETRY ON MEDIUM
On the Cusp of Becoming
For my friends, I hate that we don’t talk anymore.
There is a saying in the Yoruba language, among my people: “Twenty friends cannot play together for twenty years” and I think it is one of the saddest realities about life. I wish that saying has not come for me and mine. It seems it has. This poem is inspired by all the loosening threads of my cherished bonds. I hope we don’t let go.
Like babes yet to be fully weaned
we face this dragon of before the Stone Ages; adulthood.
We cry to be taken back (or stuck) in time on winged chariots,
but in the depths of our hearts, we know time is a haughty mistress and an illusion of our own anxieties.
After all, this is not what we signed up for in the crevices of our souls
when we couldn’t wait to grow up.
Can we really go back in time?
To a time when we were still suckled and cuddled?
When we could sit in the sand and play, ‘daddy, mommy and children’ stuffing fistfuls of its earthy delight into our mouths,
A time when we knew our friends by faces and not from stories told behind screens,
A time when we didn’t feel the abrasive distance of circumstance nor the silence of lonesome battles.
Did we ever think we would miss the seasons we rolled tires barefoot and flew kites over rambunctious, untamed laughter?
Did we know that when we grew up we would long for the days of freedom we were so eager to swap;
For being tall and big, for deciding whether to eat the meat before the rice, for choosing how our lives turn out?
We carry on our shoulders weights of identity crisis, torn between the longing for self, discovery, individual paths and companionship,
And yet pining for redemption and the warmth of togetherness. Ore meta, lorita meta; a song we hoped never to relate to.
Our memories are the weapons we hold onto, to keep these unraveling threads but even time has that on a chokehold?
At the verge of dawn, we wonder which relationship adulthood will snatch from us today or if it will grant us the grace to even keep ourselves.
Is time the enemy?
Is she the culprit that has put adulting as the nemesis of friendship?
Or words unsaid?
Is it distance?
Ultimately it must be life.
And we must grow up without fail and dance to the tune we chose when we couldn’t wait to grow up.
Not all of us can be Pan even though we wish it so.
Friend, when I eventually call or we eventually cross paths, I hope time does not stay the hand of our fierce embrace.
Here in the now, let’s make a promise to pick up where we left off.
I hope your eyes and heart still smile when I cross your mind;
If not, I hope it’s not the misunderstanding of distance or adulting or a love that once was and is no more.
Friend, if we must turn strangers, let’s become ones who can metamorphize back into friends after the storm is over, after the growing pains have become numb,
After we’re finished with the preliminaries of adulting.
Ore meta lorita meta: Three friends at a T-junction, three crossroads.
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