WHY DO WE CHANGE?

            That morning, when he saw the sun submerge into the sky with a shimmering and scarce radiance, he knew the day would be different; he knew the day would be dry. The rains had been frequently coming down lately, lending the sky a sour face and breeding the wind into chill and frosty whispers. He hated it, because he would stay, the better half of the day, inside his room, or sit on the awning and savour the septembral dampness attached to everything his eyes could glimpse. He would then ponder on nature; why rains fell, why the trees were coated in a bursting greeness, why the ears tickled in the cold, why the earth seemed to be scrubbed properly after each downpour. When his wonders returned to him as they had come out of this rusty mind, without answers, he would then begin to mumble songs he knew not the lyrics or drum on his laps or check his pimples with mum's cracked hand mirror.

Today, the day dawned in a tasty dryness and he was sure he could smell Christmas from four months in the future. He streched off the pains from the bad positionings of the night's dreamy sleep, and wished, for the thousandth time in his life, that he would cease being a bad sleeper. Sometimes he would wake up to find himself clinging tautly to his bed, some other times, he would wake up with a start in the middle of the night to realize that he had fallen to the floor from his sleep. His sister, Adanna, had frequently made a sickening joke out of it all, saying that he played karate with the blurry ghosts from the dream world, and that he fought so weakly that the blows he received from them followed him into the real world, to the extent that he fell from his bed. Adanna, after blabbing her annoying joke, was sure of nursing a bruised chin from his slaps. But what surprised him was that she seemed never to tire from doing so, that sometimes he wondered if she loved being slapped or beaten up. Why on Earth could she not stop with her taunting joke.

             He strode lazily to the bushes blooming near the 9inches-blocks arranged hapharzardly at the corner of the compound, and released the liquids his bladder had gathered through the night. The sensation that sprung up his spines as he did so was breathtaking, pleasurable. A feeling he wished he could have all over again. It did not surprise him; the eccentricity of him taking pleasure from mere urinating. He was not a normal human being; half way into the lockdown, he ceased being a normal human being.

          He went back to the varender and slumped onto a sit. He was not surprised that he no longer brushed his teeth these days. Once he wanted to eat he would drink some water, dance it around his mouth, and then spit it away, making it trail a line of moisture on the ground. Then he would wash his face and that was it. He was sure of one thing, and that was that he was gradually going mad, and he was aware of it, and it was this knowledge, this awareness, that intensified his madness.

         The birds nestling in the broad canopy of the mango tree in the middle of the compound sang effortlessly while the children from the neighborhood gathered at a pile of sand by the pathway to build sand castles. Their childish voices rose in harmony with the birds to make the morning blissful. He watched them contemptiously. A child rolled a ball of sand and stoned his playmate with it, his face lit up in a lingering grin, while the girl whom the sand-stone hit bent to ball a fistful of sand for a premeditated revenge. Others engaged in slapping the sand over their buried feet, to make it compacted so that when they suspiciously slid out their feet, they would then build short but lengthy sand fences to guard their treasured buildings. They usually deserted these houses too soon that Mama Emeka's hungry goat trampled on them as it searched the scalloped surfaces of the world for food.

              A question sprung up his sickening mind as he watched the children playing in the pleasant morning.

           Why do we change?

           He was not surprised. It was normal for his naughty brain to bring up such questions on days he woke up from the ground, especially on days he knew, and was convinced that he would not brush his teeth.

           At a second thought, he felt he knew the answer, but unfortunately, only a black but thin curtain separated him from the answer, and he only had to push it aside to embrace the answer to his question. He was sure he was gradually becoming wise with his frequent meditation and ponderings, but what bothered him was that he was not sure if this was how wise people felt or was he growing wise in the opposite direction?, in madness? He was becoming a mad-wise-man. What an interesting phrase.

          'Why do we change,' he mumbled to himself, straining his eyes to look beyond the playing children, beyond the bursting greeness of the trees around and the buoyant growth of the blade-grasses in the bushes, beyond the presence, and finally gaze into the timelessness of that which was, is and could be.

By Maxwell C. Ngwu (April 27 2020)