The first disappearance started on a Wednesday. The sky was grey with water, her clouds thick and swollen. Like frightened things, the sparse trees in the estate tried to run against the wind, but they were rooted to the ground; the wind, fierce, wrestled them into stillness. It was here the first child was plucked. He was five years old by the look of things, wearing a yellow raincoat that swept the moist ground under his feet. He picked his way through ridges caused by floodwater littering the street, lips folded between his mouth, a lollipop in one hand. His carer, a 16 year old braiding her friend’s hair, had not noticed when he slipped through the gate, out into the street, in search for his mother. Because he had been crying, she nestled him in her arms, muttering apologies to her friend who sat waiting in the backyard of their flat and bribed him with a lollipop. Seeing that his cries had thinned into soft sobs, she went back to her friend, mistaking his silence for sleep. We don’t know how soon she realised he was gone, but we knew she was frantic, checking every nook and cranny of the balcony, their house, the street. But the boy was gone. We found his coat floating on water, nothing else. Grief and anger swelled in his mother’s chest. She pounced on the girl, taking a huge chunk of her flesh with her teeth. Only the police could come between them, their black clothes dripping water, their guns at the ready. The girl was carted off to the police station where she was beaten black and blue, arrested, tortured. In one week, she went from slightly plump with an oily cocoa complexion, to a railthin, soot coloured girl with open sores lining her face and forming several maps across her body. People claim she’d sold the boy to her boyfriend so he’d get her a phone. Others claimed she was a witch. Still, he wasn’t found. She threw herself into a river; her swollen body rescued by fishermen thinking they’d caught big fish. Still, the boy was never found, and another disappearance happened, right under our nose.

I grew up around many children. There was always a flux of them at home, in the compound, on the street, so every post, signboard, and declaration of missing persons, especially children, hits close to home. This may not be a perfect story. But it is one worth telling.

If you're here right now, I believe you're in the right place.

Here, there are people like you with life balance on the red, waiting for the next energy check to finally ball again. They, seemingly, have depleted their debit lifecard and can't get a loan to regain what they've lost.

They, also, can't afford their lives.

I like seeing the girls who have afforded their lives on the internet. I follow their stories like a monk studying the Bible, flipping through the countries they have visited in their highlights. They have skin like milk or chocolate or something soft, shiny, and their cheeks are so plump I want to reach out to touch them. I like career women. Their voices are loud, boisterous. Their smiles, as the moon gleaming on a clear night.

While you’re here, you can help me donate a small sum for my best friend’s eye surgery through this link.

I want to be like them, but in my own way. I have fought the good fight of passion. I know struggle stories at the back of my head; nights spent writing or singing or sneaking around to do something their parents told them not to do.

I've been there. I've done those. I've rebelled.

But still, life is a huge amount of money I haven't been able to grab. It's the plush apartment I keep eyeing, but never can rent or own.

So, in a bid to afford my life, I chose to ask myself some very important questions. They are honest questions, questions you also can ask yourself.

What am I doing?

It seems simple. But it is tricky. I'm not a motivational speaker, and I can't advise you or anything, but I speak for myself when I say, sometimes, I don't know what I am doing. I know myself. I am very self aware. But what am I doing?

I've been doing a lot recently. I impulsively began a website, two newsletters, a number of small projects, and this mafia book I want to write because I need the money, obviously.

So my first exercise of asking myself if I can afford my life is asking myself what I am doing.

Do you own your life — or let me put it this way; do you own the decisions you make?

Some pivotal decisions in my life are other people's ideas. My dad, my sister's, and if I hadn't been courageous to wrench the reins of ownership and exert control over my own decisions, my friends. If you want to be able to control your life and be that version of yourself you see, you must push out the people trying the landlord that acre of brain. What they have are thoughts ruled by their perceptions. They don't know you internally, so they don't get to decide where the lawn and the pool should be. You do. Do you understand? So yes, own your decisions. Own yourself.

Does your career lead to the path you want?

Tricky question. Sometimes the path you want isn't the path for you. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. As you can see, I'm touching lots of different stuff. Success lies in curiosity, and curiosity manifests, also, in yourself.

I don’t know the last question because I believe this should be a personal question. You know what itches you, what you desperately want. You know it. I don’t. So, perhaps, this last question is:

Do you believe in manifestation?

I do.

So complete this exercise with me. Manifest what you want, your deepest desires.

I want the courage to start on new feet, in a new place. I don’t care if it’s from scratch as long as it aligns with my destiny, as long as it is fully my decision. I manifest.

I was desperate to buy my life when I submitted to a few internships and failed them because of my lack of adequate preparation. I also could not get some of the things I wanted and got some others. So it’s safe to say my manifestation na just credit wey I dey owe myself.

I’ve begun gathering the materials for my manifestation. Imagination wan wound me. In one of those imaginations, I am a TEDx talker dressed in pencil thin skirt and a floral sweetheart blouse, my hair kinky and full, hosting a segment of How Much Of Your Life Can You Afford?

While you’re here, you can help me donate a small sum for my best friend’s eye surgery through this link.

This will likely be a full-blown cringe moment, but I have passed the point where I care for opinions.

So I’ll start like this:

Many of you may have heard my story. It’s one I tell everyday. It’s a story of passion, of tenacity, and sometimes, impulsivity. One day, I woke up to see that I could not afford my life and began a list of haphazard projects to challenge myself and the people who failed to believe in me — myself, inclusive. It started with me looking in the mirror, to all the ways I have used the knife to cut my eyes and height and vision. Vision is the same as eye, you know. They symbolise dreams in a way.

Today I have a personal website, two up and running, lovely newsletters, two more websites and sample documents for everything I experiment with. Mine is a life of curiosity, of actively learning — and sometimes abandoning learning materials. Failures and successes meld together, and although I have severe breakdowns the entire time, I manage to get the work done.

This is for the manifestation girlies staying up late, crying (silently), suffering breakdowns, self-sabotaging, yet wanting to afford their lives.

I want to write something random. Someday, sometime, in a future that isn't too faraway, I want to write about the sweet nothings of the universe and not have the lofty expectations that trail closely behind all of my creations.

I write this as I sip tea.
Days earlier, I went cold turkey on social media, turning only to my goals for the year and ticking them. It is evening. The ceiling fan continues to whir above me and I listen to its music. It's unrhythmic, like my life. Nothing, really, is in sync.

Even my desire to create randomness is very random, very unlike me — or very like me because my friends have said, “you're random” when I blurt something out mid-discussion — and not in sync with my desire to create balance. Wait, do I crave balance? Don't I like the topsy-turvy route my life is leading?

I have been reading Bernadine Evaristo for a few weeks. Something in her writing prises me open. Maybe it's the humour. Maybe it's the sincerity of the characters and the bareness of their lives. I see them naked, with secrets, with attractions people consider not normal, with dreams, with babies they hide from their future husbands, with breasts they remove with time, with rebellion, with enthusiasm for the world, with wariness, with judgement, with hate. In a way, I relate with many of the characters. I have been them at some point. They have been me. In a twisted way, I was linked to them, their stories, so much that I had to be told to know better, Evaleni. You are a writer and this is a book. It's fiction, not real.

Not real.
Real.
These two have often been the same in my mind. So, while I have been random in my exclamations and the kind of things I say, I have never really taken note of the random. I have never really looked outside of my head for too long.

I left home for a while. I did not run away, like I did from the world. I wanted a reality different from my alternate one. I have been here for weeks. Not trapped. I will run if it comes to that. Here, I have begun to read the randoms. You see them along with the routines. Sometimes they stick out. Other times, not so much. You just spend more time noticing.
I notice the way my friend guffaws. The way her brother smirks. I notice the feel of water. I look too long, at things, people, like I have been granted sight for the first time. I see.

It hurts to see.

It is unpleasant to see.

But I see.

I notice that their mom crushes garlic into every drink. The taste coats my tongue and no matter how I try to wash it out, there is its residue, announcing its plan to have a longer stay. I go for a live interview on the verge of tears; I’d prepared the entire night, with my boyfriend, thinking of a time I’d have my own laptop. The rejection comes three weeks later with none of the fondness the shortlist mail had come with. I recline into the waters of depression again, allowing it to fill my soul with fog, looking down, never up, saying to myself, you, you failed this one. Again.

I read manga, laugh at how cute the characters look, spend weeks drawling through essays and fiction and poems. I stall at writing in my blog.

One time I thought of making playful art. Something to laugh over, something that loosens the noose I wound around my imagination? Often, I think of creating the next big thing. World wonder. But what of the simple, the mundane? What of the everyday experience?

Today, I hoped to create playful art, but it is heavy. The simple somehow became thick clumps of emotions.

— Evaleni, on The Purging.

On the night you left, you lay in the bathtub of your apartment, right in the puddle of red water streaming under you. You were bare-bodied and cut, clutching my right hand so tightly I felt each spasm of your trembling body.

It was one of those nights.

You’d call first, your tangled breaths coating me with fear. I’d take a taxi to your block and hurry up the stairs, knowing I’d find you in the bathroom, clutching at the rims of your tub, crying or bleeding or both.

On those nights, I held your left hand as the things in your head raged, and listened to you argue with your body. Sometimes you laughed until you cried and like a song mangled beyond recognition, it was hard to fork the two apart. So I listened for the breaks, the soft grunts, the ‘just let me go’s.

You were nothing but fragments breaking at the touch of water, but needing to explode into bits.

Did I catch you on some days? Yes. I held you to my chest until you calmed, not afraid of being swallowed in your storm. I walked into your dark places with and crouched beside you; you mumbled softly about the autonomy of your mind, how it raged, how it wanted to end you.

Other nights were different. I couldn’t save you early enough. The night you left was like that. You’d broken into bits, had tried to quell the voices by digging a grave on your wrist.

And I was too late.

The phone in my left hand continued to beep.

“Go home, Sarah,” you gurgled suddenly, your hand twitching in mine. You sounded like a man losing a war. Your tuft of brown, wooly hair fell over your face. The gash on your wrist glistened and dripped into the tub. I followed its progression, noted how it darkened the water. “Go home and forget me.”

“No.” I shook my head and inched closer, my lips trembling. I wished then, I could scoop a little of your pain, make them mine. You’d become a blur of tears in my eyes. “I want to stay here, with you.”

In this fog of emotions and memory, I recalled the first night we met. You were playing the guitar in an open mic session when your eyes found me. They stayed. Now I wished that you too would stay. But you were a drifting soul. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t string you back or close the gashes on your skin. I could only pray for you to stay a little longer. If not for me, but for the medics bursting through your apartment door and the baby I feel growing in my stomach.

But your lids were drooping ever so softly, as the thunder of footsteps and sirens drowned my sobs. And I knew then, that you were gone.

Evaleni Lawson likes to think of herself as an evolving inferno. She’s a writer, student journalist and not-so-undercover spy who spends a great deal of her time holed up in her school cafeteria interviewing African tech slash creatives and reading or writing weird (and sometimes sensible fiction).

Check her rambling about boys on Twitter @evalenilawson & creating blog posts at alteéverveart.blog

Many people tend to describe me in all of the things they know about me. I watch them grapple with a definition, plaster on me a label, call me naive, say as though they have seen my heart beating inside my chest, that I have a soft heart. Little do they know that I’m a universe of glass. I mirror them and yet, slit their skin.

I’ll start with an alternate time and universe, because those are when I feel safest. I am nothing on these dates, not even the idea or thought of a name. I was, perhaps, in my small cocoon of delusion, an extension of time, but crooked in a manner that made straightening more of a farce.

1998.

Attention was a deformed thing the first time I interacted with it. It was a constant longing that, when sated, exploded into short bursts of satisfaction, and died rather quickly, before it ever got to its zenith.

Like hand-me-down shirts to be gifted for Christmas to my eager hands, attention was an ill fit and rather short on supply. I was too large for the attention that came to me in sprays. I was too much of darkness, light, sunshine, rain, worlds tumbling and tussling for the few visits attention paid to me.

I was too much of a strange child.

I knew attention even before it knew me. I knew its name, and that children my age showered under it. I knew that I hadn’t felt it yet, and that, right before my eyes, it was shared as a gift, passing my outstretched palms. Its bright rays looked muddy from where I stood, but glorious, too. And I wanted it to myself, by myself. I wanted a world where I wouldn't have to share the attention I received.

But did I get that world?

Maybe yes. Maybe not.

In this essay, I'll water my delusion. I'll name myself my father's favourite child and pretend that I got an ocean when I asked for a pond. You see, it's not their fault—his and mom's. They were quite young when they had to share attention that should be theirs to children. God's children. Children who were ordained to be theirs and no one else's.

You would think God would inundate these little children with affection. But he never paid a visit, and even when the other children were satisfied with his continued (and felt) absences, one child, an odd stray sticking out of an entire bunch, wandered farther away from the short stock of attention.

As you would guess, this child was me.

Look first. I'll write in aphorisms. I'll create scenarios to make you understand better. I hope you bear with me. Pretend this is a class and you're learning to distort yourself. Attention can be such an overwhelming thing, and if you're like me, you would have had to cast likkle disappearing spells on yourself or seek ways to bend, to become not so beautiful —

I'm digressing. I apologise. Sometimes, I lean wholly into the narrative I try to express that I forget myself. Here is it now;

We have compared attention to a threadbare shirt. Now, we will compare it to a basket of apples. Remember that this basket isn't full. It only has about two apples. Each parent takes one. Their children round them, clamouring for a taste of the apples that their parents have (and will share, for nothing is theirs really). As you would guess, the parents have to cut these apples into slices and feed each. But one person's share may be bigger than the others. One will be given last. One will have a sweet name and an apple. One may have none

I looked forward to this threadbare shirt with excitement even when I knew it would be torn in different places, and wouldn’t carry me the entire year. I wanted this and wanted more. Maybe that was my sin. To want more. Because expectation breeds a screen. In this screen, you see all the could-be and never reality. You immerse yourself in smoke. You avoid air because air tells you you’ll die. Air is reality. Smoke is the thing you smother your fear of dying with.

Why Distortion?

Once, when I was entering preteenhood, I looked outside my body and saw that attention wasn’t all that short. It was a large thing. But it was deformed. It had an ugly face sometimes. It shapeshifted. It was the teacher smiling at you in class, in front of your classmates, and saying, Lawson, your essay was so amazing, one wouldn’t know you were lying; to the stout man in the kiosk looking first at your breasts before your face, and saying, You don dey grow oh.

The streets were replete with it. It tried to touch you, to feel your budding chest, to push you to a bed. It licked its lips when it talked to you, hoping to entice you. It followed you on the sidewalk for your number.

And I didn't like it. I'd hated it before it came along. Being a curious kid, I'd spent my time observing this attention and the consequences. I schemed, even when I wasn't sure I was scheming, and came to a conclusion.

“I will become a boy,” I told myself. “I'd become untouchable.”

But I wasn’t. There were times when my facade broke and all I wanted was a make-up kit and a mirror. I wanted to stop hunching my shoulders. I could only wear makeup indoors, though. I didn’t want to be the centre of negative attention. I didn’t want to be whispered about. I didn’t want to be the girl running back into the shadows for fear of, well, everything.

The first time mom saw me wear a sleeveless gown after a long time of asking me to dress like a girl for once, she was pleasantly surprised. I didn't know what I felt at the time. But for long I had been a different person, wearing variant versions of myself.

With each level of awareness, I donned a new mask. Headscarves, first; hair cut, next; weight loss, last. I'll explain them.

I covered my head a lot as a child. This was due to both my religious upbringing and my need to hide. Hide. Cover your bare shoulders. Hide. Wear dull coloured clothes and a scarf. Hide. Jewellery brings them to you. Hide. Hide. Hide.

There were times I cut my hair. Each time I went for this ritual of mine, I would tell the barber to give me a boy carving. Of course I always ended up looking ridiculous, but I deluded myself to think I resembled a cute boy.

When I wasn't wearing dull, big clothes, I wore flannels and jeans. Once, as an act of rebellion against my body, I acted as a boy for my church drama. It felt liberating to stand under the gazes of everyone in a new skin, with a new name, as a new gender.

Look. I tell this story as I remember, in bits. It is larger than me. It is all-encompassing. It is how, for so long, I have shredded this skin and that to dare to be what I am, audaciously. I have tottered to this point of self-awareness. I have carefully probed myself. I know what I am, have known for years and hidden it, and what I'll do with what I am.

A woman. Even though the word tasted bitter.

I had looked at my growing breasts in the bathroom for a long time one day, and decided to cut them off. That was before I loved them, before I grew familiar with the weight of them just above my chest. I was always practical about what I wanted. There were a lot of things about me people never understood. I kept those things to myself and talked the easier ones out. Like my dreams for instance. It is easy to talk about them because they are easy, because they are gems that make my eyes look brighter, and offer a semblance of light to you who look at me, who is beguiled by the softness of my smile, the tenderness of my heart.

But I'll ask you a question now.

What would you do about the darker ones, oh friend? The ones that are the reason for my emancipation.

Do I like what I see in the mirror? Yes. Do I like my new face? Yes, but let me correct me. This isn’t my new face. It has always been here, just smudged by the many splits you’ve seen of me.

Next skin; boyhood.

This was the longest episode of my obsession with running and hiding. I told you how I rebelled. Well, I continued this journey of rebellion to my hometown, when I began to wear a new skin.

If you'd known me from Lagos, you'd know that the word Mgbeke was what was used to describe me. But in this new skin, I flitted between two identities. I distorted myself.

I'll tell you how;

I left Lagos in March 2017. I was almost 13. The boys were eager to meet this new city girl. They flocked me like ants attracted to sugar. I knew then, it was time to change my dance, to learn theirs and disrupt the movement. So I started a transition again, borrowing their mannerisms, a chameleon learning to survive the wild. I hung out with my cousins and laughed very loudly with them, went fishing, set traps, attempted to till (but broke my bones trying 😔), called the boys who gave me love eyes bro and watched them crumble on their love, shook hands with them, and dressed like a boy. Most importantly, an ugly, dirty boy. I had this brown, mud-stained trouser and quite a number of shirts. I walked around with a toothpick in my mouth. I wore a straw heart.

One looked at me disbelievingly and said, wit de way you act person will no tink you was in Lagos.

So you see? My distortions worked.

Until it didn't.

I began to gain weight at 14. My mom had opened a restaurant and like that, I became more visible. My bubble was gone.

There is nothing sadder than losing your shell.

And as I stepped out into this new glare of attention, there were more people lingering by the shop, wanting to talk, teenage boys following you on the sidewalk, trying to talk; men making lewd remarks, and of course, making talk.

The urge to lose weight became an obsession. That was my final distortion, one I never recovered from.

I have always found the need to protect myself in this strange world, to become less visible. Although I toyed with the prospect of becoming a face model once, I just sank into myself until that dream withered, then died. I tried saving it, but couldn't.

I remember coming to Uyo, wanting to lose weight. I was 15. The men were even more strange. You walk to the opposite shop to get something and a man in a car pulls over, calls you softly.

You greet.

He smiles. You know you are beautiful.

You continue walking, already feeling fear walk on your skin in its damp clothes. He drives so that he matches your pace,

I want to be your friend, talk to you. Do you have a phone number? Give me.

I don't.

How can a big girl like you not have one?

You're not a big girl, you tell yourself. You're 15.

He says. Another line, then? Something I can reach you with? I'll get you a phone. I'll get you…

I hated it. But it happened a lot, until I was staying indoors more. I barely ate when I stayed indoors. I just read what I could find, be brave enough to be myself, be brave enough to love my face without altering it.

I feared the word, friendship. It had a strange ring to it. People used it when they wanted something. I became increasingly paranoid. The faceless world of the internet appealed more to me. I wrote more, to shift people's attention from who I was to what I could be, an amazing version of this same person who was trailed by strangers for numbers, who ran away often. I knew that pure attention could be corrupted. A friend who pays you attention will demand attention. A boy you call friend will introduce himself to people as your boyfriend. Your boyfriend's attention will waver, and his eyes will lose their light until you become out of reach again, and he will look for you through the glass screen of your heart, searching for the familiar version of you that had craved his attention.

Attention to me, doesn't look all that nice.

But like a book that has undergone many levels of modification, I have also transitioned into not shying away from attention regardless of its intent. I will run no longer. I will no longer distort myself or dim my light. 
I'll become a woman without fear.

I'll love myself.