Every event is an expression of a story. Every smile and every tear drop, every laughter and scream and thunderstorm, is an expression of an event whose story we may never be privy to, but whose signature registers in the ultimate chart of our world’s history. They say when the world formed; everything in it became participants in an inveterate struggle for survival. A struggle from which we all have emerged as offspring of stars whose ancestors too emerged as offspring of molecules lucky enough to have survived nature’s brutal auditioning. Our existence is ultimate proof of nature’s fondness for schadenfreude.

* * *

I was five when I witnessed, and even participated in the event that took place sometime in 1998. We all were called upon, children, grandchildren, wife and well wishers, to pay our final respects to nna’anyi uku, our great father, as we say. I was a grandchild. We took turns to approach his bed as he lay in it, straddled between a fleeting world and nothingness. It was not clear to me what we were required to do when we went up to him, but I had with me my artistic masterpiece; a sketch of a butterfly perching on a rose flower. In retrospect, it was not very good. When it was my turn, I walked up to his bedside, kissed him on the cheek and handed him my work.

It seemed the last spot had been reserved for my grandmother, his wife, who up to the time she was being motioned upon to go forth to him, had sat at the corner of the room, weaving a handheld fan. When she was at his bedside, everyone looked on, in what seemed to me like anticipation of something of which I was probably not aware. My grandmother stared at her husband, and then back at us. After about ten minutes of this, I could see my mother wipe the tears from her eyes. I never understood any of this, especially why my grandmother looked at her husband as though she beheld a silhouette, as though he were only an episode in a lucid dream. When we were back home I asked my parents why grandma had not kissed grandpa on the cheek like we all did. My mother pulled me closer to herself, “grandma is a beautiful soul…but she is not very healthy…she remembers no one, she remembers nothing” she said.

* * *

We may indeed never matter to the universe in the grand scheme of things, but we matter as fellow storytellers plunged unto the pages of the cosmos. And as we drift through this chaotic wave, our stories collide and change shape and form, as new stories emerge from the debris of this colossal impact. In a thousand years, our cells will probably tell a thousand different stories as they too drift in time through this chaotic wave. In a way, we are our ancestors, we are our offspring, we are the big bang in all its resplendent majesty, transformed by chance into conscious beings, we are matter with the ability to tell stories.

My grandmother passed away about six years later. It took another ten years for me to fully grasp the tragedy of that event I witnessed at five. My grandmother stood there as she beheld the love of her life, someone with whom she had created a thousand memories, with whom she had built stories that now lay repressed within the recess of her mind’s abyss. A part of her lost within a part of her. Her husband looked up at her, he knew, he understood, he held and squeezed her frail hands. Two life forms journeyed through time and space, telling a thousand stories, ‘til their paths collided in what situations we may never know. And whether they matter to the universe in the grand scheme of things or not, they have told their stories, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

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Awesome! Great writers are great thinkers - people who ask the questions which lead them to the many laboring gears behind the face of the clock. You're one of those. I liked 'Music' too. And if you hadn't said so already, I would say you were the writer with a fluid soul.

RaggedyAnn:
Awesome! Great writers are great thinkers - people who ask the questions which lead them to the many laboring gears behind the face of the clock. You're one of those. I liked 'Music' too. And if you hadn't said so already, I would say you were the writer with a fluid soul.

Thanks for the kind words, Ann. I just read 'Sorrows of Happiness.' You too are a great writer.