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“Careful,” she said. “You’re weak.” I gathered my backpack and was off before she could change her mind. Professor Okpala was not head professor of the mathematics department for nothing. She’d calculated everything probably the day she met me. It was only much much later that I realized the weight of that brief warning.
“Humans. Always performing.”
You go to a family member and if not, you hold it in, deep, close to the heart, even if it tore you up inside.
“Just make sure you breathe,” she’d said as I left her office hours before the journey. “Breathe.”
“When you face your deepest fears, when you are ready,” she’d said. “Don’t turn away. Stand tall, endure, face them. If you get through it, they will never harm you again.”
But I couldn’t breathe. I pressed my hands to my chest, as if I could cup my own beating un-torn heart, as if I could calm it.
“Shallow breaths, increased heart rate, you’re having a panic attack,” a stiff female voice said in Khoush. “I am,” I whispered. I didn’t like for my astrolabe to speak, but Professor Okpala had had me set it to speak whenever I had a panic attack. I’d protested back then, but now I understood why. “I suggest you drop into mathematical meditation.” The voice was coming from my pocket, in which my astrolabe was warming and vibrating gently. “If I . . . do, I learn . . . nothing,” I gasped.
Such things did not move Okwu and all it would say was that these would not kill me and I should strengthen myself and push past it all.
The three days passed, as time always does when you are alive, whether happy or tortured.
“I will wash this off soon,” it said. “It’s not good to feel this pleased with life.”
when I’d faced a race of people who detested all humans because of a few humans.
I didn’t know what it all had done to me. It was there sometimes, and then sometimes, it wasn’t. I was peaceful, then all I could see was war.
Instead of assuming the greatest choice I’ve ever made for myself is making me sick? Home is making me sick! I was fine until I got here.”
It was like wading into an overpopulated galaxy.
As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo. I remember thinking, The gods are many things.
Professor Okpala described it as “another language beneath the language.”
Was it solid gold? Gold was a wonderful conductor; imagine how precise the current I guided into it would move. If I did that, would the sphere open too? Or even . . . speak?
“You people are so brilliant, but your world is too small,”
“One of you finally somehow grows beyond your cultural cage and you try to chop her stem. Fascinating.”
How different my life would have been if my parents had just let me dance.
“Sometimes it’s best to tell people what they need to hear,” my grandmother said.
“I only know what I am taught,” I whispered. “That’s not true,” he said.
Plus, I didn’t want to turn back. Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?
Why expect what you expect?”
I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but I’d thought I’d broken myself because of the choices I’d made, because of my actions, because I’d left my home to go to Oomza Uni. Because of guilt.
“What will you be?” she asked. “Maybe it is not up to you.”
I was worlds.
