In The End, It Was All About Love

by Musa Okwonga

They say that everyone’s life is to be lived as their own, but it’s hard enough just escaping the templates of your parents.

When you’re lonely, cities grow around you.

You wish your skin were a visa, since there are several places it cannot travel. It cannot go to certain European towns, because when it does it may be set upon by local youths, provoked by its confident passage down the middle of their streets. It cannot visit certain boardrooms, certain hearts. What a time to have a migrant body. What a time to live within this terrifying vehicle, this dark bulk.

Because that’s what you still feel like, an artist with potential. Someone who is surrounded by people who are truly doing it, who are making progress; someone whose plane is stuck on the runway while everyone else’s took off a long time ago.

You and your fellow artists are all climbing the same mountain. As you grapple with the gradient, your numb fingers clinging to the indifferent rock, some of them will race past you, up through the clouds, and beyond to the summit. You are rarely jealous of them, but you do feel envy. Because you just want to join them up there, and rest awhile, savouring the view.

What kind of a climber are you? Well, you’re a slow one, sometimes a lazy one. But you are still there—and, though you perhaps set out with less equipment than you thought you would need, you are still ascending.

Why do you always work so hard, friends ask. And you never have the heart to answer: because the harder I work the less time I have to think about being alone. But if you work so much you will never meet anyone, they say. Yes, you think. That has become the point of all this activity.

It is an excellent way to trick yourself into productivity. You contact a company to ask if they would like to work with you, you write to a producer and ask for a beat, you ask someone on a date. The company is keen, the producer politely declines, and the potential date says yes. But most importantly, you asked—you gave yourself a chance. You return home one evening and you see the signs on your hallway mirror, your kitchen wall. You have a lot to offer, they say. You can do it, they say. Yes I do, you think, and yes I can.

You are glad you do not have a child. You couldn’t imagine looking at them across the breakfast table, and risking eye contact—the eye contact which, within a split-second, would reveal to them the most horrifying of all truths: Daddy doesn’t have a clue what he is doing.

Look at the things you do for a living—poetry, journalism, music. It is almost laughable how allergic you are to making money. No, there is no alternate reality where you are some corporate titan. This is always who you were going to be.