I am a tweet.
A few nimble fingers just sew me together to add to a thread, or, be as an illustrious stand alone.
*
I am here.
But not in a powerful point of essence. Sometimes I make myself out in the impressions of shadows; altered, incomplete, marred or made, depending on the mood.
And with the moods, I am constantly emotionally transient. I tell a friend that my feelings switch with dizzying expertise from a thing to another, a building crescendo from the basic virtues of sad and then happy, towards the mid-base of ultra sad and then ultra ecstatic, a little higher up to feeling mind ravingly caged and then exponentially free, and then here I am at the apex, without the will of dissection nor accurate identification of feelings.
Like waiting at the bus-stop for a danfo or a keke-napep, like seeing the rusty yellow bodies trail behind each other, calling out your route, like they know where you are going, like anyone knows where you are going, like you sometimes hate that you might never really know where you are from because there hasn’t been a defined lettering of history on the wall of your soul, just scraps and clips, and sounds, and emotions, and feelings that don’t make a standard whole, like you are still at the bus-stop, yet unable to raise your hands to walk away, and find decision.
My friend looks at me with his eyes, and tells me to be careful, emotionally and physically careful.
There are some things we can’t afford under this horizon.
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I don’t suppose I want to call out homophobia on this medium, I don’t suppose I can get away from the hate that mistakes subject us to.
Perhaps when I am fine, perhaps.
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There is a way that I carry my past about with me, it spills into my conversations, pollutes my evolving essence, colludes with present possibilities and corrosively grows ‘aradite’ footholds in the agency of my soul.
So it can make me assume that every man will be like the last, that the awe the first felt is what the next will feel in manifolds, that assault is a necessary albeit flawed order of induction.
*
I like road trips. The dust can so heal, the sights even though I’ve seen them a few times before, helps (I can’t comprehensively say how, it just does), Lagos conversations on metro is always an effective (and highly recommended) distraction, everything works tonically.
But for the moments I am no longer in the unavoidable proximity of my phone, alone in a room that wraps, and wraps me up, hot and cold, at once.
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For a lot of the times I question my past, when I go back to investigate the possible variance of my conformation, I find something new, something startling and undecidably regretful.
I find that I should never have been kissed when I was, he never should have touched me when he did, our bodies shouldn’t have known that sacred bliss even if it was in admirable bloom, my heart shouldn’t have been lost in a pond of gritty flightiness, but then how else would I have known I am a root and not the rooter.
But perhaps, either ways I might have found that out some other way. Some other linear way.
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Five Easy Steps To Tame A Boy
*Tell him he is wise, wiser than his age, and so his destructive inexperience doesn’t matter.
*Make him feel grateful to you for regarding the clumps of his jelly soft self-esteem.
*Tell him to dress well, so as to look sexier to other men, you cannot afford to keep him for yourself for long.
*Teach him the advanced techniques of emotional perseverance, when you eventually realise he is a minor.
*Touch him. It works like magic.
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Self awareness is good at a young age, I am eternally grateful for not having to spend too much time working myself out, and then inexorably having to transfer to the circular process of discarding and reclaiming myself.
But I know of boys like me who didn’t get this imperative education in the right way, which seemed and sometimes still seems like the only way.
Boys who get torched and never want to stop ravaging the swamp for imposed senses of being.
Boys who can never call it rape because even when we might get the tiniest courage to say no to his advances, he can hold us away and towards because he knows we fear to be alone, because he knows we don’t have friends we speak an agreed language with.
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This is supposed to be a heart break story, I was supposed to shoot myself in the leg yet save myself some sympathy in the sense of things I never really know.
I was going to say I lied, I was going to say he found out and made me feel like a venom, I was going to say we had a headless tussle in which I believed I needed to be cut some slack, I was going to take it up from a subjectively objective glance, perhaps try and humanize myself and him also, just basically tell you a story that now determines my crooked state of mind.
That gives me eyes that change coffees to morning beverages, that magnify the tinniest details and put life in an HD spin.
I was going to pour my heart out, and thank the sages of electronic media for delete buttons, I was going to say I am trying to unlove a man eleven years older than I am because I have never really known any other way to maneuver affection.
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So, for boys like me, where do heart breaks come for us? How does it twist us, wring, spoil, erode, and attenuate us with the base of our senses.
Why can’t we just move on and not see intimate failures as a thread of curses that wouldn’t stop unspooling until we reach the point of possible nothing.
We scrape. We fight. We fly brazen skins over. We slick, slack, and de-concenterate.
We move on, to still not find people our age interesting enough to cup our mangled histories.
I think Dua Lipa knows us, and how we are afraid to the seams of our bones, to be alone.
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Five Obscure but Effective Ways To Love A Boy( untested yet).
*Tell him he is all right.
*Don’t touch him, and don’t let him touch you.
*Encourage him to mingle, to fight through the thicket where boys with fluid understanding of his language are.
*Listen to his yearnings and help him with the rigorous fixture of dissection.
*Let him know you love him, in ways that say you care. In ways that say you are a friend.
*You might be saving a soul.
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Oh! Did I say five? Sorry, achy heart in session.
