His death chilled me to the bones. Was it the compact layers or the spongy layers of my bones? I couldn’t discern. Not because I do not want to, but because I chose not to.
My father, as a teenager, meticulously warned me about boys, but he was dismissive about girls before he rested. He also meticulously warned my siblings about girls and was dismissive of boys. Once, he swapped our brains with the idea of ‘notebooks’ and ‘exercise books’ in history. He had requested exercise books from the local bookshop and then, a week later, when he was hosted at the illustrious hotel close to the airport, he requested notebooks or a diary.
“Why was that daddy?” One of his children asked, after he recounted enough stories on his sick bed; the most hilarious.
“Those of us colonized by the British call it exercise books while those who weren’t colonized called it notebooks,” he said. “Americans call it notebooks while we call it exercise books.”
My proclivity for historical knowledge was still shut down after my father’s death because I could not make a measured sense of it. My incredible sense of ambition made me selfish in other areas of life that would have benefited me until I lost my boyfriend; my fair-in-complexion boyfriend; the one my father warned me about and against, on a black and dark Tuesday in the heat of the pandemic, to the orchestrated extermination of young black boys and girls by the black police, and three months later, I was denied the scholarship to study in God’s own country. I was upside down and unfortunately unparalleled to my siblings.
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Celestine Seyon Reuben, professionally known as Celeyon, grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He is a young and promising Creative, Academic, Research, and Content Writer and Producer, who illuminates the complexities of human experience in works and publications inspired by events in his native Nigeria and Africa. Celeyon explores the intersection of personal and the public by placing the intimate details of the lives of his characters within the larger social and political forces in contemporary Nigeria and Africa. His work has appeared in various publications, including The Triumph Newspaper, Readsy Page, Writers Space Africa Magazine, and his website – Humane Letters From Celeyon. His Story “The Rest is History” was shortlisted for the 2024 African Writers Awards. Celeyon is currently working on his first book.
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Read – Obliterated – A Flash Fiction by Omondi Owino – Kenya
