Life Happens, You Know
By: The Kalahari Review
Tags: African Literature, Nigeria, Fiction, Titilola Giwa

Life Happens, You Know

A story exploring the peculiarity of a young woman who decided to go after everything she wants the way society told her not to — by Titilola Giwa The Kalahari Review Follow Dec 24, 2020 · 9 min read

After telling my loved ones happy New Year, I switched off my phones and went to the room. In there I picked up my first book of the year to read. There was something peaceful about reading a novel set in a coastal city as the fireworks were going off outside. I stayed up till I turned the last page with a smile on my face. “She will be caught”, I said to myself but that was not the only good thing, the good thing was the sun was high up on my first day in the New Year. With that thought I knew there was no better way to start this decade except with a book in my hands.

Staying up all night has left me feeling exhausted so I walked to the bathroom and had a quick shower. You would think my next stop would be the kitchen for tea, but I just pulled the curtains and went to bed. “Time to sleep”, I told myself. My sleep was neither peaceful nor troubled, but I remember falling from place to place. I woke up without remembering any of my dreams but isn’t that what they say, we forget most of our dreams by the time we wake up. Well, I forgot all of mine but it didn’t matter as I didn’t care. I checked my phone and saw a missed call from my mother then went over my messages. Nothing special there waiting for me. They were all broadcast messages sent to the various groups I was part of. “Time to eat”, I told myself then those two voices in my head started their almost constant debate. To drink or to not drink wine. To drink wine won but not immediately. Wine would have to wait till the later part of the night. I was glad because I wasn’t ready to have my mind in a haze just yet. The bottle I bought yesterday was almost empty and being drunk doesn’t feel good all the time. In the kitchen I made pounded yam and ate it with the vegetable soup from the freezer. There was too much traffic in the vegetable. I say this when the dry fish, ponmo¹ and snails was more than the vegetable itself. Sometimes it feels like an absolute nuisance and sometimes it doesn’t. Today it was. I ate purposefully, enjoying my solitude. The life of a young single woman in Lagos is so peaceful. Especially when you live alone and can afford most of your bills. In this city it’s not easy to get all three. You can either be single, living with your parents and their constant naggings or you could be single, living alone with the constant worry of survival permanently at the back of your mind. Or you could be living with someone, broke and also stuck in a relationship with a good-for-nothing. So I considered myself lucky but also hardworking. I don’t have a job so to say and I don’t have a business but I have three sugar daddies and that’s a full time job.

Now, you’re interested. I bet you just sat up straighter or you just arranged yourself more comfortably on that couch where you love to lay while reading. This is getting interesting you’re telling yourself. Well, it will be interesting. My life is an interesting one, one where I go after what I want without one doubt in my mind. Let me introduce myself to you. I am Folashade Smith, 23 years old, 5.7ft tall, 57kg and beautiful. I am beautiful. Don’t start to judge. Beauty helps no doubt, but my life has not been built entirely on my beauty. It was built on my intelligence (however cliché that may sound), attitude and class. The last two I learnt. We all have dreams and I had a lot. My first dream was to be a surgeon. A damn good one. Then I wanted to be a hacker. After that I wanted to be a system analyst but at the end of it all I just wanted to be rich. How do you get rich if you don’t want to do all those things they preach about in self-help books? How do you get to afford the things you want without having to wake up to work every day? How do I drive a luxury car when I don’t want to start a business? Questions, questions, questions.

A beep from my phone brought me out of my thoughts. Alhaji is calling. What could he possibly want on New Year ’s Day when all his mates were spending time with their family? I decided to ignore his call. Of the three of my men, I enjoy the company of only one. The remaining two are just cows for me to milk money off. I am sure they also see me as just a pretty young face to have sex with, so nothing is a loss. My favourite is gentle and attentive. The makings of a great partner but he could be crazy at times. In the sugar world you have to be careful about the way you go about having feelings or you’ll end up as a nuisance to the men around you. These men want zero drama. They only reason why they spend crazy amounts on you is because you’re an avenue for them to escape the drama in their life. When I started making money I realized I didn’t want a permanent boyfriend. Those relationships are usually much too stressful for their alleged benefits. Why would I want to be stuck with just one person when I can fly from Paris to the Maldives with a lover in each city? That is living. The excitement and adventure of romance with different people whose language of love is as unique as our genetic makeup. Think about it.

With my food fully settled I went to the terrace with the bottle of wine and settled into the one of the chairs facing the city. Lagos is a beauty. Light from moving cars shone in the glass panels of the tall buildings. The moon was up high and the sonorous symphony of human voices mixed with music from nearby clubs and restaurants wafted up to the balcony of my twelfth-floor apartment. Combined together they all had a calming effect. I was relaxed. Time for a glass I told myself. As I took my first sip, discerning the flavours of the wine on my palette, my mind went back to that miserable afternoon three years ago. I was in a small room where you only had to walk three steps to touch the wall. Buckets of water lined the walls with windows. The white bucket with a lid was mine. I was very protective of it. I didn’t want the other girls to contaminate it with their dirty habits, hence the cover. There was six of us living in this room. Looking back I don’t know how we did it. We had two tables that served as our dressing and cooking table. It also served as the occasional reading desk. The fan had ceased to work one month ago. Nails decorated the walls. They were adorned with hangers carrying our clothes on them. We had two tiny windows. The mosquito net on one of them was torn, it provided an entryway for the hordes of mosquitoes that feed on us at night. We had no rat but we had multitudes of cockroaches. They were everywhere. It was during this period I learnt that cockroaches love moist places. I guess they get thirsty too. Water is meant for the living.

My stomach was giving me a lesson in hunger that afternoon. I was very tired. The noise from my belly would be embarrassing if I wasn’t alone. When suffering gets to the point where your next meal is unattainable you begin to make major decisions. Luckily for me I had data subscription on my phone. That one wasn’t gone yet. So I decided to send a text to a man that has been asking me out for a few weeks. I told him to come over that evening. I set an alarm on my phone and fell into a deep sleep. It was the only way to hold on till the evening. I woke up later in the evening, took a shower and put on a dress. His call came in not quite long after I finished dressing. I went outside of our low cost housing to meet him outside. You could tell that he was glad to see me.

“Don’t use sir for me” he said as I greeted him. “We need to be free with ourselves or is sir a fetish of yours”. I smiled and told him no. His not saying sir will make this simpler. No need to go through the hurdles of respect. We took a walk along the curved road that was lined with flowers so much that the air was heavy with their sweet fragrance. To an outside eye we looked like a normal couple having an evening walk but my mind was in turmoil. I was trying to understand what the walk meant. I imagined it would be a journey to the slaughterhouse where my legs would be spread and I’d receive some notes at the end. It had happened once and I ended up depressed but life moves on. On that day three years ago I didn’t go to the slaughterhouse. I slept with a full stomach. My purse was filled with enough money and I had extra to make a new hair and get some clothes the next day. In fact that man didn’t take my clothes off my body until three months later when I was ready to give it all up. That was the rebirth of Folashade Smith.

People always think about the money associated with this life, but they don’t think about the hurt that comes with it. It’s not the sex we trade, it’s our feelings, mental health and happiness. One morning I woke up to the wedding pictures of one of my men. Of course I knew he was getting married, but no type of preparation gets you ready for such things. You try to rationalize it by telling yourself you don’t care, but you do. You do. That morning I cared and I felt a tightening in my chest. It hurt so bad that I was with a this man the weekend before, it hurt so bad that he offered to lodge me in the same hotel with the rest of the family during the weekend so I could attend and watch him get married. It hurt me so much that how I felt was of insignificance to him. At times like this I questioned myself and ask why the hell I was doing this to me. This is a form of self-harm you know, but money prevails.

I think I’ve given up on the pursuit of lifelong happiness. I am happy in a way but beneath that island of temporary satisfaction, there is a whole ocean of pain, deep hurt and unhappiness that nothing can cure. Shoes make me happy, bags make me happy, travelling makes happy, but all for a short period of time. After a while, I begin to search for the next high. The next insignificant thing for me to wretchedly suck happiness from. It is a very bad way to live but we are who we are. I meet a lot of other ladies like me and I see the way they go about searching for natural happiness, the type that feels like the breeze at sea and I laugh. It was all useless, their efforts. An unfruitful search I may say. It hardly comes. There’s a way it eludes us, tempting us, teasing us, making us feel as if we’ve finally had it, then it disappears just as we are about to snatch it, leaving us with a deep dark hole in our chest. Sentencing us to the prison of our heart with pain as our daily ration. No, not again.