I Grew Up and Stopped Looking At Stars
In the days when the generator burned through the diesel, its whirring noise flattening and dying into the night, I remember how you’d fill the lanterns with kerosene, light the lantern wick ever so lightly and set the tables outside for dinner. Back then, we would cut boiled yams and slide them around in stews and palm oils, laughing or arguing about whatever a family did when they had a chance to be together. Dinner under the verandah or what we call “porch” now in America was about looking at the sky, and swatting away small flies flickering towards the lanterns. In those moments, while carting the plates away to the kitchen, I looked up a lot. The sky was pitch dark and the stars were bright and the air smelled clean, with the occasional waft of smoke from our neighbor’s generator. The power in Lagos was always going in and out; we still did not have constant electricity. Lagos was a city sparkling all at once and dying almost,like a star that continually rebuilt and collapsed in on itself. I never thought that we lacked, though. Looking up there were so many of them, those stars. They twinkled, ignited, died out, staying far but within our vision.
I would spend many years looking up, looking at stars that looked down on me, young, eager, and full of froth to count which were there and which would be gone tomorrow. What was an airplane and what was cosmic? And when the other generators in our neighborhood died, the night would be silent and I would wake up from sleep, stare at the window wondering what it was like to be so close to the only form of light that illuminated the sky.
Adulthood came and I grew up, and for some reason I no longer looked up. All the problems seem to be down, not on the ground or in my hand, but buried on a level where looking up is no longer an option.
On a summer night in 2014, I heaved and pushed with the littlest of my upper body strength, to open the tiny window in your attic room, somewhere in a brownstone on Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn.
All I had done since I moved to New York was climb. I climbed career ladders and fell to the bottom, my butt and ego sore from trying. I let my heart climb away from the cage in my chest, its little detached veins like tentacles clinging on to my sleeve. When that failed too, I locked it back, all the while looking down. When I think of it now, laying my head on a dirty asphalt rooftop, I stare up at the stars and wonder if they had even moved at all. As a party bustled downstairs, I lay and stared at the stars for the first time in years, the smoke from your cigarette filtering over my head. Just like in Lagos, I wondered if I really was material or cosmic, if it was worth it to spend my time in New York City climbing and falling. You lazily point out Sirius, The Big Dipper, naming them like people you’ve known all your life, and I am left thinking that this could have been me, too. I could have been a person with that same sense of familiarity. Why did I stop looking up? How did I know that I was not like a star or airplane? In the grand sky scheme of things, one meant I could one day collapse on myself, implode. The other meant that no matter how high I soared, I would someday have to come down.
Coming down through the window in the attic was easy, someone had placed a chair at the bottom for “soft landing.” My feet touch the plastic and then hit the floor, and I can only peer through the window again, wondering if I could still look up and feel the same way. When we were up there, it felt closer, closer than I had ever been to touching the sky. I felt that I could stretch my hands, reach out and fix, tweak, polish every star just by being out there on that roof. But the climb down made me feel small again. Maybe this is what it’s supposed to be like; grandiose moments of elevation and downward spirals that seem bottomless, absymal. Maybe we are supposed to enjoy it, these ups and downs, yo-yoing across the board like a lifeline that needs to be straightened.
When I say goodbye to you on the stoop, I look up at the sky again and the stars seem smaller, the night sky is a milky gray and I want to remember to keep looking up. I tell myself that things should never get to the point where I forget to look and count who’s there and who isn’t. I want to keep playing the game of what is airplane and what is star. No one was eternal, and for as long as stars lived they would be gone, too. Would the climb or fall give my life more meaning? What if I had not climbed at all? How would I know what that feeling was, the feeling of sitting on such an elevation, my hands reaching towards the sky to touch something that was still so far away? My heart is heavy, because the girl who sat on a verandah in Lagos is gone. She no longer carts plates to the kitchen or wakes up to the rhythm of dying generators. I have left her on the roof of a brownstone with cigarette butts and asphalt. I turned the key in the keyhole, trudged up the stairs, and I wept.I Grew Up and Stopped Looking at Stars
In the days when the generator burned through the diesel, its whirring noise flattening and dying into the night, I remember how you’d fill the lanterns with kerosene, light the lantern wick ever so lightly and set the tables outside for dinner. Back then, we would cut boiled yams and slide them around in stews and palm oils, laughing or arguing about whatever a family did when they had a chance to be together. Dinner under the verandah or what we call “porch” now in America was about looking at the sky, and swatting away small flies flickering towards the lanterns. In those moments, while carting the plates away to the kitchen, I looked up a lot. The sky was pitch dark and the stars were bright and the air smelled clean, with the occasional waft of smoke from our neighbor’s generator. The power in Lagos was always going in and out; we still did not have constant electricity. Lagos was a city sparkling all at once and dying almost,like a star that continually rebuilt and collapsed in on itself. I never thought that we lacked, though. Looking up there were so many of them, those stars. They twinkled, ignited, died out, staying far but within our vision.
I would spend many years looking up, looking at stars that looked down on me, young, eager, and full of froth to count which were there and which would be gone tomorrow. What was an airplane and what was cosmic? And when the other generators in our neighborhood died, the night would be silent and I would wake up from sleep, stare at the window wondering what it was like to be so close to the only form of light that illuminated the sky.
Adulthood came and I grew up, and for some reason I no longer looked up. All the problems seem to be down, not on the ground or in my hand, but buried on a level where looking up is no longer an option.
On a summer night in 2014, I heaved and pushed with the littlest of my upper body strength, to open the tiny window in your attic room, somewhere in a brownstone on Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn.
All I had done since I moved to New York was climb. I climbed career ladders and fell to the bottom, my butt and ego sore from trying. I let my heart climb away from the cage in my chest, its little detached veins like tentacles clinging on to my sleeve. When that failed too, I locked it back, all the while looking down. When I think of it now, laying my head on a dirty asphalt rooftop, I stare up at the stars and wonder if they had even moved at all. As a party bustled downstairs, I lay and stared at the stars for the first time in years, the smoke from your cigarette filtering over my head. Just like in Lagos, I wondered if I really was material or cosmic, if it was worth it to spend my time in New York City climbing and falling. You lazily point out Sirius, The Big Dipper, naming them like people you’ve known all your life, and I am left thinking that this could have been me, too. I could have been a person with that same sense of familiarity. Why did I stop looking up? How did I know that I was not like a star or airplane? In the grand sky scheme of things, one meant I could one day collapse on myself, implode. The other meant that no matter how high I soared, I would someday have to come down.
Coming down through the window in the attic was easy, someone had placed a chair at the bottom for “soft landing.” My feet touch the plastic and then hit the floor, and I can only peer through the window again, wondering if I could still look up and feel the same way. When we were up there, it felt closer, closer than I had ever been to touching the sky. I felt that I could stretch my hands, reach out and fix, tweak, polish every star just by being out there on that roof. But the climb down made me feel small again. Maybe this is what it’s supposed to be like; grandiose moments of elevation and downward spirals that seem bottomless, absymal. Maybe we are supposed to enjoy it, these ups and downs, yo-yoing across the board like a lifeline that needs to be straightened.
When I say goodbye to you on the stoop, I look up at the sky again and the stars seem smaller, the night sky is a milky gray and I want to remember to keep looking up. I tell myself that things should never get to the point where I forget to look and count who’s there and who isn’t. I want to keep playing the game of what is airplane and what is star. No one was eternal, and for as long as stars lived they would be gone, too. Would the climb or fall give my life more meaning? What if I had not climbed at all? How would I know what that feeling was, the feeling of sitting on such an elevation, my hands reaching towards the sky to touch something that was still so far away? My heart is heavy, because the girl who sat on a verandah in Lagos is gone. She no longer carts plates to the kitchen or wakes up to the rhythm of dying generators. I have left her on the roof of a brownstone with cigarette butts and asphalt. I turned the key in the keyhole, trudged up the stairs, and I wept.
