Dear friends,

There is a tale of babies that live in the bush and cry without end. As the story goes, they're always with a rolled raffia mat in one hand and a lantern in the other. We were warned about these bush babies and told that anyone who encountered them wouldn't live to tell the tale. Lately, I've found myself wondering who was lucky enough to live and describe them. I'm interested in stories like this. The ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell other people and the ones that are told through generations.

At any rate, I hope you are well and getting your protein in. I am writing you from my favorite cafe/bookshop. It is divided by a wall into two sections. The first, prologue, is where new books are sold and the second, epilogue, is where used books are sold. I've always found that beautiful. A vibrant mural of blue and green petals adorns the wall, its colors mirroring the hues of the beach trip I took with friends in June, enjoying the pleasures of sitting by the ocean, soaking in the sunlight while doing nothing. This was after passing the oral exams we've spent months preparing for. 

As you know, I can't help but feel guilty when I'm doing nothing. That's why I brought my Kindle along—the "productive" act of reading helps alleviate that guilt. So there I was at the beach, Kindle in my right hand and a can of sparkling water in my left, deeply engrossed in Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus." This time, I fully grasped the feminist ideas she was communicating—concepts my 13-year-old self hadn't soaked up in secondary school. I must admit, I was reading it with the mind of a "writer," endlessly fixating on sentence structures, form, transitions, characters, dialogues, and monologues. Who knew literature could distract you from nature?

To my far left was a sight of a teenage boy walking along the beach with who I assume is his mother. They walked slowly and seemed to be having a conversation. Perhaps they were trying to hang out with the waves for as long as they could. I giggled when the mother pulled up his sagging pants, as if to signal, "You won't be a rascal on my watch."

To my right was a group of hobbyist fishermen who had been waiting and adjusting their lines for hours with no catch. I watched as a seagull quickly caught a fish between its beaks and slowly glided above them, showing off its catch to these unlucky fishermen. This is how nature brags in your face every time, never failing to remind you who's boss. But it is also beautiful, and I have grown to appreciate the things and metaphors that make it that way.

I have been very interested in the concept of beauty and aesthetics. I like to fixate on beautiful things, landscapes, and people. Sometimes I even try to find beauty in myself. I recall the day my civic education teacher called me an "ugly monkey" in class. The embarrassment I felt as everyone laughed and giggled at the comment.  I'm now half a decade into my twenties, and while some of my days are filled with compliments about my looks and style, I feel as though they're all lies. A girl recently described me as "hot and beautiful," and I've been trying to self-diagnose why I thought it was an exaggeration and not necessarily true. Why can't I believe that I am deeply beautiful and captivating to someone else?

This sort of uncertainty about myself also manifests in other areas. I'm sometimes unimpressed with my life. Nothing feels profound or noteworthy. Just a little bit here and a little bit there, ordinary in the strictest sense of the word. I'm always chasing new and updated knowledge. Always paranoid that I'm not learning new things, because up there among my fears is the feeling of staleness and withering away. I do not want to lose the sophistication and skillfulness that people adore me for, almost as if I could become useless if I do. You do not need to lecture me on this obvious personality flaw; I'm aware of it and have failed to fix it. Speaking of uselessness. I find that my self-worth is sometimes hinged on how useful I am or can be; that is why I end up doing random things for people just to signal usefulness. For me, the feeling of saving the day might equal whatever a broke crack user might feel on their first hit after a long hunt for cash.

It has been a slightly difficult year. I've lost two friends who were dear to me, and I've been thinking about what to do with all the context of themselves they left behind. The texts, voice notes, pictures, and videos. I want to remember them and want these contexts to stay with me. I am obsessively rewatching, rereading, and relistening to parts of their lives they shared with me. I found a text from last year where I expressed anger because my friend delayed paying back the money I lent him. I've reflected on the emotions I felt then and how none of it matters now. How the weight of his dying made all of that seem meaningless and unnecessary. These were close friends who shared their dreams and aspirations with me. I currently live with what are now broken dreams of theirs. My sorrow deepens when I remember they didn't get all the things they talked about.

Given recent events, I've been trying to nurture and tend to my friendships in the same manner you would to a garden, with care and consistency. I've always been fascinated with the relationships I have with my friends. We send each other memes and funny videos and say phrases like "I dey for you" and "I dey your back," because "I love you" is too big a phrase to reach for. Too heavy and entirely foreign. I love how Nigerian pidgin gives us ways to communicate what is deeply felt without using sacred phrases. I also love how sending memes serves as a metaphor for saying that I remember you and I care about you. 

We all live through our prologues, but we never know when the ride ends and turns into an epilogue. Just as John Green wrote, "You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence." I know that life doesn't always give us what we want, but still, I want you and I to evade the bush babies of the world until old age. We do not have an infinite amount of time here, but I hope that, like nature, you learn to recognize beauty—even its wild, hidden parts—in yourself.

Write to me soon,

Kelvin

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