Sometime when we are walking, I am seeing what is in front of me and sometime I am not.
Sometime, there is being forest with heavy leaf that is blocking us from the sun and there is being chirping and growling and rumbling of bird and animal and even there is being slow stomping of shorthorn, and baby wulfu is playing and we are climbing over root that is sticking up from ground or we are crawling under low branches or tree trunk that has fallen. And sometime, I am seeing boy and girl in front of me with dirty shirt that is being inside out and there is being gun over their shoulder. And I am seeing big man we are calling Commandant at front of the line and we are stopping in some place and creating hologram to trick people who are coming so that we are later killing them and stealing from them. Then I am seeing forest again with Oluwale and Uzodinma and the others who are walking with us.
In the beginning, there is no pattern to when we are stopping and sitting down and finding our peace.
But when we are sitting down, I am practicing looking for rememberings and sorting them. I am practicing organizing them, and it is becoming easier for me to be finding which I am having after Enyemaka are rescuing me from pile of corpses and which are coming from before then. I am knowing now that some of these rememberings are not mine. They are belonging to other people and being given to me. Some of these remembering is colored with red and others with yellow. But the ones with the girl I am calling Ify are blue-green. There is sometime being full color to them, but always there is blue-green at the edge. Like hologram but fuller. Maybe realer.
Sometime, it is early in the morning while grass is still wet with dew and insect buzzing is not yet as loud as it is going to be, and this is when we are sitting and finding peace. Sometime, the sun is already shot up into the sky fast fast before we are stopping to sit and look at our rememberings to find our peace. And sometime, it is when the sky is dark and the stars have come and maybe there is moon and maybe there is not that we are sitting down and looking through our memories and learning and finding our peace. Even when I am finding thing that is paining me or making me to be sadding, I am feeling like I am finding my peace. I am thinking this is what Xifeng is wanting. I am also knowing that I am having remembering I am downloading from her trailer inside my braincase, and I am knowing that it is living in me. If they are destroying trailer and burning everything inside, then I am only evidence that the people we are burying ever died. I am only evidence that people we are burying ever lived. We are observer or history writer. This is being data. These are being people, but this is being data.
Because of what Oluwale is teaching me about finding specific rememberings, I am learning how to be separating and organizing them in my brain. It is like making rows of graves and putting data into each and marking each grave to tell me what is inside it. And I am organizing by person, so this person is getting this row, and this person is getting the next row, and I am learning that I am even having inside me rememberings from people in same family, brother and sister, mother and son, father and father’s sister, so I am grouping them together as well.
“Like this,” Oluwale is telling me one day, and he is drawing spiral in the mud with his finger. It is spiraling outward and outward and outward, and he is then pressing his finger into points in the lines. “This is how people know each other in my memories. They are connected. Everyone is connected to each other. Sometime, it is not being evident how they are connected, so I put them over here.” He digs his finger into spot in the mud far from spiral. “But it is my project, seeing how everyone in my rememberings is connected. Sometime, it is because they are family. Sometime, it is because they are warring with each other. Sometime, it is because they are walking by in the street, and they see each other, and they are falling in love, but they are never seeing each other again. It is small small connection, but it is still connection, so they are going here.” And he draws a line from the faraway point to the spiral, then continues making the spiral until it touches the faraway point.
I am crouching and wrapping my arms around my knees when I am watching him do this.
“Uzodinma does it differently,” he is telling me.
“How?”
“He has made a spiderweb.” Oluwale takes his hand out of the mud and his fingers break apart at the joints into tinier connected pieces. These are scrambling fast fast in the mud so that where there was being spiral there is now complicated spiderweb. Pattern. “Each person is connected to a number of people. And each moment in that person’s life is connected to all these other moments.”
I am staring at the drawing Oluwale is making, and I am feeling wonder blow up like balloon in my chest. I am having picture of spiderweb in my head and thinking of point and how point is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more and more specific, so that when you are seeing it from far away it is like a star in the sky and every point where spiderweb is connected is like star in the sky. This is what I am thinking when it is nighting in the forest and I am looking at the sky. I am thinking I am looking at data. At rememberings.
It is being night and I am sitting next to Uzodinma and he is just finishing finding his peace and I am looking at his eyes change as he returns here from wherever he was being before. I am wanting to ask Where are you coming from? but I am knowing that we are the same in a very important way so I am asking Where are we coming from?
He knows that I am not using my voice, so he is knowing everything that I am meaning when I am asking this. There is being no expression on his face when he is saying, “I do not know.”
And then he is showing me holographic video of him being child of war and shooting and killing and being small small but pointing gun and killing, then there is explosion, and then he is showing me other holographic video of him being in what is looking like hospital. And I am knowing it is hospital because I am seeing place like it in other rememberings, and there is no blood but there is being nothing but air where his legs are being. And we are turning in the remembering to see the doctor’s face and the doctor is saying things, but I am thinking that there is so much pain in the remembering that the person is not being able to hear the doctor’s words. Then I am seeing other holographic video where Uzodinma is holding himself up on two metal bars and he is looking down and his legs are metal and there is no skin on them, they are just gears and pistons and rods, and they are moving slow slow and Uzo is gritting his teeth and moaning and sweating much, then nurse is coming to hold him up before he falls to floor. Uzodinma is fast-forwarding through other memories. He is receiving new arm and he is returning to one room over and over again and he is being put into chair, and we are both feeling cord plugging into outlet at the base of our neck and then there is darkness until he is waking up.
“I don’t know what happens to me when they put me in that chair,” Uzodinma is telling me. “There is only darkness. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if I am dying and coming back to life. But I am needing to know what is happening in that time, because that’s the secret to who I am.” He is looking at his hands and the different color skin all over them. “What I am.”
“Is that where we’re walking to?”
Uzodinma nods.
“What about the others? Do they want to go to different places?”
Uzo is looking up at the sky where it is showing between the tree leaves, and I am looking up with him and thinking that maybe he is seeing in the sky the same thing that is being inside his head. “Some of them might. But some of them want to know what they are, just like me. If I can find an answer, maybe they can as well.” Then he is looking at me. “We are the same,” he is telling me. “We are sharing mystery.”
It is taking me a long time to speak because I am feeling like he is seeing me. Not how Xifeng or Enyemaka are seeing me and not how drone is seeing me and not how people under Falomo Bridge are seeing me, even though I am calling all of these people friend. He is seeing inside me and outside me at the same time. He is seeing all of me. He is seeing the question I am asking and he is seeing the question underneath that and the question underneath that. He is seeing that I am worried and scared and that I am sadding and that I am learning new thing every day and it is filling me with fear, and I am thinking he is seeing all of these thing because he is once feeling them too. I am feeling like he is seeing me, and it is making me to want to be thanking him. “How are you knowing where to go to find this place or this person you are looking for?”
“I am retracing my steps,” he is telling me. “I am remembering that one time when I am being child of war I am walking this path, but I am going in other direction and I am leaving many dead body. So I am walking this path again and I am seeing what I am doing in my head when I am being younger and more foolish. And this is how I am knowing where to go. When the killing and the bleeding in my head is stopping, I will know that I have arrived. I will know that I’ve found what I am looking for.”
And I am thinking that maybe when he is finding what he is looking for, I will be finding it too.
When he is first saying we are sharing mystery, I am thinking he means we are both having something wrong with us or we are both having disease inside our body or our leg or arm is broken the same way, but now I am thinking that he is saying it more like we are sibling. We are brother and sister.
We share mystery. We are being family.