The Colour Yellow.

 

Dear diary, 

I keep hearing their feet thunder past my door yet no one knocked or walked in. There's an absurdity in how I'm being watched. 

This morning, I could see the sun above the walls. The sunrise stabbed through my window and cast a bright yellow across my desk; it reminded me of the yellow buses in Lagos.

I lost my glasses the first time I ever boarded a yellow bus. Tragic, really. I just got them that year. Lagos rushes you in ways you can never prepare for. The sea of people, the urgency in their steps, the constant hurry to arrive and leave. It was all so new to me. In Lagos, you don’t really live, you just exist, swept along by the current.

These buses do not stop for anyone. So when I stepped off that yellow bus, the crowd consumed me, jostling me from shoulder to shoulder until my glasses disappeared into their tide. 

Sometimes I imagined them to have been crushed under the weight of some middle-aged man who smelt like wood, dead flowers, and faint perfume. The colours in his clothes and eyes are all washed out but he keeps on moving. Perhaps still grieving the loss of his wife, but still needed to pick up his three kids from school. They're all he has now, but if it was left to him, he would go back to her in a split second.

Or it could've been a young woman whose fatigue had adorned her neck as she scurries to the market to cook for a husband she feels more fear less love for. A husband she wouldn’t leave because she's going to become a mother, and aren’t children God’s precious gifts? 

My glasses got drowned in a flood of bodies; in a water of history I’ll never be familiar with. So I didn’t bother looking for them. 

I wanted to explore everything as quickly as possible. I had a feeling I wouldn't be here again for a while. The highlights of the city and the places kept behind the scenes. But it was difficult for me to get around. I didn’t know anywhere by name, but I could describe them. Sometimes I walked, and I watched children dressed in matching uniforms cross the road; one murmuring about the day’s wonder and another whining about how she cannot wait to be done. I wondered what it felt like.

I explored the roads surrounded by tall buildings and the streets surrounded by the sweetest food you'd ever taste. Hawkers thrust Gala and Fanta through the bus windows, their arms like bridges between worlds. Women balanced baskets of oranges and groundnuts on their heads, calling out in sing-song voices. Street preachers shouted prayers into the smog, their voices colliding with the sharp clang of conductors yelling, “Enter with your change o!” 

Lagos is chaotic yet beautiful. An old friend called it Africa’s Sin City.

 I tasted fruits that left colors in my mouth and heard songs that made me want to dance. 

It didn’t take long to weave myself into the linens of the city. It took me escaping a few days in a month but it was worth it. People say you just know how to do these things, that it's in your blood.

My first kiss was on a yellow bus. I found a way to escape and went on a date with this beautiful boy I was secretly talking to. His skin was surreal. I told him he could be a supermodel. He had the prettiest eyes, like he carried the moon in them. I have never seen such eyes, I only ever imagined them when I read. He was careful too, as though my heart might slip from his hands and shatter. He offered me his love and sweater and everything else he held dear, but I told him there was no place to hide such things in my room.

We journeyed to the waterside. My slippers sank into the damp sand, grains sticking to my toes like they wanted to follow me home. The waves rose and fell, restless and loud, as though they carried secrets from one shore to another. It sang to us like a choir of restless children. He said they were trying to tell us something. 

He told me he used to love the sea as a child, that he would chase the foam until his mother’s voice pulled him back. But then something happened and he came here less. He never said what it was but his voice broke a little, as though the sea had taken something from him and never gave it back.

 He was starting to build a home in my heart, one that might collapse if I breathed too loudly.

I told him it was getting late and it would be difficult to sneak back in. He asked why I needed to sneak back in. I bent down and told him I wanted seashells.

The shells were small miracles—striped, speckled, smooth. I scavenged like a little child, filling my hands, feeling happy again in a way I hadn’t for so long. Each seashell represented something I've always longed for but this time they couldn't slip through my fingers. 

The sun retreating beyond the sky's reach looked oddly like the one I had doodled and stuck to my wall. Sometimes, I forget where dreams end and reality begins.

We boarded the bus, its metal body rattling like loose teeth, and after a while, it was almost empty. The air smelled of salt and roasted corn I had stuffed into my bag. He told me about things that kept him up at night.

Fireboy’s Need You floated from the driver’s radio, dangling like veins from the ceiling. The melody curled through the air, but it dragged a memory with it. I remembered the first time I had seen a lifeless body swinging here, feet just inches above the sticky floor. It would have been strange to tell him while such a song played. Some things are too heavy to speak over sweetness.

He looked at me like he had never seen anyone more beautiful. He took his heart, invisible but heavy, and placed it in my hands. He told me to take care of it. I told him to kiss me.

He tasted like sugar and saltwater, like honey and all the sweet things. The bus bounced, our teeth clashed, and a spark leapt up my spine, scattering into my head like fireworks. For a moment, the bus became a boat in the ocean, and the window became a horizon. It felt like I was dreaming. We laughed, we whispered about stars, about freedom, about what it means to belong.

It was that easy—to be understood.

I wanted to tell him I was insane. I wanted to tell him I was insanely in love with him. I thought I’d see him again. I was insane to think I’d see him again.

The last time I entered a yellow bus, I went somewhere far away. I thought of running. I thought the road might open its arms to me and lead me somewhere new. I rode until the last bus stop I knew by name, and that was when the fear began to set in. Where would I stay? I didn’t know anybody outside of them. Who would I go to? What would I do now?

The street names blurred into one another, like a book written in a language I couldn’t read. I tried to retrace my steps, counting the overhead bridges as if they were rosary beads, hoping the numbers would guide me home. But the bridges mocked me, they multiplied and disappeared.

I couldn’t reach him. My pockets were empty of his voice, my hands empty of seashells. The city felt enormous and hollow at once, and I was a child again, wandering inside it with no map.

 I was lost, I was distressed. My heart was in my mouth. The sun tried to linger a little longer for my sake, but she had to go. The darkness pressed at my shoulders. The crowd no longer looked like people; they looked like shadows, moving me where they wanted. And that was the day I was caught.

Eventually, I found my way back, but the odds weren’t in my favour. They said I was wild and crazy and had to be sent here.

Now the world is small. I count my steps in this room, trace the cracks in the ceiling, and listen to the hum of the fluorescent light, which somehow sounds like that song on the radio. I tell them I’m okay, that I’m not crazy. They tell me I’m schizophrenic and need to be watched.

Dear diary, I wonder if that sweet boy was ever real, but I really miss the yellow buses. I miss the roads and the streets, the women selling under the sun, the chaos and beauty of it all.

Now, when I look out the window, all I see are walls.