I have no faith in the capacity of anyone to save me, but I believe, at least, that people would be willing to find me—I believe in that unyielding determination we humans have to seek out what is lost no matter how far-flung away it is. I believe this so blindly that I close my eyes and swallow any lump of doubt that suggests otherwise. I want, at every point in my life, to be found.
The idea that a person could just disappear in the middle of their existence and never be seen or traced again, terrifies me. How do people handle this kind of loss? This flesh-eating emptiness that comes with the sudden disappearance of loved ones? To have an answer to the gaps in your life, even if it breaks you, is more dignifying that playing guess games in your mind. For example, to say that a person was on a street and was shot is more concrete than saying, ‘we don’t know where she has been in the past three months.’
These are the thoughts that preoccupy me every time I have to make a trip and share my itinerary with my family. Or every time I share random, unsolicited details about my movement. I announce travel routes and reservations and plans, but what I really mean to say is: If it seems like I have gone missing, this is where to look for me, this is where I have last been. Or, if you see the news and there has been an event, don’t start worrying unless you absolutely should.
I imagine that this kind of concern lodges itself in the belly of many parents, or lovers. These worries that we acquire, then learn, then perfect, becoming masters of worst-case-scenarios. Or maybe not. When parents send out their grown kids into the world, do they worry about all the things that could happen to them? Do siblings insist that locations of their other siblings be shared, not because such knowledge can avert trouble but because knowledge of a thing that is missing can at least, satisfy the worrying mind? I don’t have any nuggets, only questions.
It occurred to me recently that one of my biggest fears is not death—whether of myself or of those I love, but instead, not knowing when something requiring intervention has happened to someone I care about. Or coming into harm myself and worried that those who should know, do not. Once, my sister got out of a terribly dangerous situation and instead of responding with gushing relief or gratitude, I obsessively complained about her failure to communicate the circumstances. Why did she not mention her intending trip? Why did she not check with me first?
“If anything had happened, where would we have searched, how would we have known? I asked my sister. “You are not a child, learn to be responsible and carry people along.” However, what I should have said, “You could have gotten lost and then, what would we do? Where would we start searching in order to find you?”
My mother, from whom I inherited most of my fears, has a different idea of what it means to be lost. To her, to be one thing, and then to stop being that thing, is to be lost. I think about this, and how, earlier this year, I held a job as sturdy as the ground that holds my weight. It was a good place, and my career which had previously slowly inched forward seemed to acquire an impressively gliding pace. But the year ends with me tucked far away in a different space, living a life much smaller than I imagined and surrounded by a quiet that makes the fact of thinking seem like chaos. Is this, too, not loss? This being away from myself, and the crawling feeling of everything I left behind calling me back home.
When, many years ago, I told my mother that I was giving up an opportunity to practice law, she grieved at the idea that I was squandering five years of school. Then she grieved over the loss of what could have been a defining career. When, years later, I told her that I was leaving my job for a graduate degree abroad, she wondered aloud if I was not making a mistake. Recently I joked with her about eloping with a foreigner in response to her long-standing demand for a wedding ceremony, but instead of laughter, the conversation became a drawn-out prayer: haunting and premonitory.
“When a woman leaves all Nigerian men and goes for a foreigner, she is gone forever,” my mother said to me. She meant that change has to be paced and measurable. She meant that the steps I had taken in the last two years were good but in huge leaps, too far away to into the unknown, and here I was, proposing the idea of a white-skinned lover. But what I think she meant to say is “I love you my child and I am afraid of losing you, I am also afraid that you could be lost to yourself.”
Although my mother’s idea of loss is different from mine, we are united by one common factor: Our obsession for control, our desperation to stay close to those we care about, our desire for certainty. But certainty is a tricky thing. It tells you that you can achieve a patterned template for your life, that there is a script – a beginning, a middle and an ending. It tells you that your life can be known fully and that every arc and bend, every shift and turn, will inevitably land you in the safe cushion of your happy ending. My mother is a pursuer of certainty. She moulds us into the image of her convictions, kneading us through prayers and ultimatums and sometimes, emotional blackmail until we become the best self-made version of everything she thinks we should be—safe but small, broken but with plastic contentment.
I, too, am obsessed with control. I want to know where the days are heading, or if the loneliness can be sculpted out of the story, or if we can take happiness and put it in a bottle, but more importantly, like my mother, I want to know fully the lives of everyone that I love. I want to hold them so tangibly in my hand and trace my fingers through their lives so that in the event of a tragedy, I will know, for certain, of their fate.
But this piece is not about control. It is about wings flapping violently mid-air, hands trashing out in the endless ocean, people wheezing, fighting for air in their lungs. It is about those we love wanting to be free, wanting to fly, to swim, to breathe easy. Blood or not, people don’t always choose love. They choose freedom! So, as my siblings and I grow older, and as they more vocally embrace their independence, I feel them begin to slip out from my hands, much like how my mother has felt me fall further away from her with every well-intentioned discouragement whispered to me.
Love is a risk. To exist in this world is terror. People change. They slip away. Time creates gaps and rifts and blood can become strangers. There are many ways to lose a thing before it disappears. Still, I hope that when I am lost, there are people out in the night screaming out, calling me home. I hope my life is worth the search party.