I have no faith in the capacity of anyone to save me; but I hope for people’s ability to find me—I believe in people’s unyielding determination to seek out what is lost and bring it home. I want this so blindly that I close my eyes and swallow any lump of doubt that suggests otherwise. I want, at every point in my life, to be found. The idea that a person could just disappear in the middle of the day and never be seen or traced, terrifies me. How do their families handle not knowing for sure where they are or what end has come of them? For example, to say that a person was on a street and was shot is more concrete than saying, ‘we don’t know where she has been in the past three months.’ God forbid! Sadly, these are the thoughts that preoccupy me every time I have to make a trip and share my itinerary with my family. I announce my travel routes and flights and plans, but what I really mean to say is: If it seems like I have gone missing, this is where to look for me, this is where I have last been. Or, if you see the news and there has been an event, don’t start worrying unless you absolutely should.
I wonder, sometimes, about people who go missing. Well, not really about them but about their families. When parents send out their grown kids into the world, do they worry about all the things that could happen to them? Do siblings insist that locations of their other siblings be shared, not because such knowledge can avert trouble but because knowledge of a thing that is missing can at least, satisfy the worrying mind.
It occurred to me recently that one of my biggest fears is not death—whether of myself or of those I love, but the idea of not knowing when something requiring intervention has happened to someone I care about, or coming into harm myself and wondering if my family were aware. One time, my sister got out of a terribly dangerous situation and instead of responding with gushing relief or gratitude, I obsessively complained about her failure to communicate the circumstances. “If anything had happened, where would we have searched, how would we have known? I asked my sister. You are not a child, learn to be responsible and carry people along.” However, what I should have said, ‘You could have gotten lost and the anxiety of trying to find you would have broken me.”
My mother, from whom I inherited most of my fears has a different idea of what it means to be lost. To her, to be one thing, and then to stop being that thing, is a loss. When I told my mother that I was giving up an opportunity to practice law, she grieved that I was squandering five years of school and then grieved over the loss of what could have been a defining career. Why could I not simply continue on the path I had started off with? When, years later, I told her that I was leaving my job for a graduate degree abroad, she wondered aloud if I was not making a mistake. Recently I joked with her about eloping with a foreigner in response to her long-standing demand for a wedding ceremony, but instead of laughter, the conversation became a drawn-out prayer session and admonition.
“When a woman leaves all Nigerian men and goes for a foreigner, she is gone forever,” my mother said to me. She meant that change has to be paced and measurable, nothing drastic. But what I think she meant to say is “I love you my child and I am afraid of losing you, I am also afraid that you could be lost to yourself.”
Although my mother’s idea of loss is far-flung from mine, we are united by one common factor: Our obsession for control, our desperation to stay close to those we care about. My mother, through her fears, wants to control the people she loves, because—of course—she cares. So, she moulds us into the image of her convictions, kneading us through prayers and ultimatums and sometimes, emotional blackmail, until we become the best self-made version of everything, she thinks we should be—safe but small, broken but manageable. I, on my own part, want to control the people who matter to me. I want to know where they have been or where they are planning to be. I want to hold them so tangibly in my hand and trace my fingers through their lives so that in the event of a tragedy, I will know for certain that they are safe.
But it turns out that what people love even more than your compulsive affection for them is their freedom. Blood or not, people will choose the spaces that give them room to breathe. There is a brand of love that becomes so stifling it becomes a prison. So, as my siblings and I grow older, and as they more vocally embrace their independence, I feel them begin to slip out from my hands, much like how my mother has felt me fall further away from her with every well-intentioned discouragement whispered to me.
The thing is, no matter how sincere we are or how carefully we layout our good intentions, we can’t always keep the people we love, the same way you can’t keep a thing merely by trying not to lose it. Love is a risk. To exist in this world is a terror. People change. They slip away. Time creates gaps and rifts and blood can become strangers. There are many ways to lose a thing before it physically disappears. You can hold on to tightly, but your clenched fists are also a weapon of death. So maybe the only way to truly keep a thing is to surrender. As the tired proverb goes, if you love something, then you need to set it free!
