WRITING IN LAGOS TRAFFIC

       

     WRITING IN LAGOS TRAFFIC

You take your pen out of your bag, just then, you remember you haven't taken out a notepad yet. Jokes on you, man—you have no bag, so where is the pen and notepad coming from? In the convulsing heat and mass of clustered bodies, you remember you have a phone—so you take it out of your pocket. Man, this is Lagos and you don't keep phones in pockets, why are you even taking things out? Maybe you need to take these thoughts rambling through your head out, arrange them strongly in lines neat and nice, and hang from them.

You set out to do just that, but you see, the bus you are in is not high enough to carry out your sinister plot. So, you just look away. You shouldn't have. The gala seller caught your eye and stretches a hand of friendship towards you. Where you're from, you don't reject hands of friendship except when it comes with gala. Again, you look away. This time nothing catches your eye.

You double tap your phone to wake it up, it wakes up to an abstract art covering your whole screen. As much as you're fascinated by art, it doesn't interest you. You unlock the phone to see 6:07pm boldly staring back at you as if to tell you how much you have wasted the day. Searching for the music icon is the next thing, you tap on it and leave whatever-is-playing on repeat.

You have no interest in whatever-is-playing, you just need to drown out the passengers insulting the conductor because of the extra N50 transport hike. That N50 can get you a bike home. The first time you thought of it, you were angry, even the second and third. Now is the fourth, so you have your mind made up to trek home. Moses trekked. You're becoming an Israelite because you share the same name.

With whatever-is-playing on repeat, you finally open your notepad to write. | —that is your cursor blinking at you repeatedly, screaming silently “If you don't know what to write, just get out!”. Amazingly it creeps into your ear and your response is to minimise the app to open WhatsApp. Maybe, just maybe you can find your muse buried somewhere in 163 unreplied messages. It's 6:38pm; you're still on WhatsApp— laughing at hilarious memes on people's statuses, smirking at ridiculous messages and finally muting people who bring their whole gallery to the web.

It's 7:00pm and you decide it's useless writing in Lagos traffic.

— Cranium X 🍃