Memory Lane Can Be A Sad Place | Animashaun Daniel

Friends retracting from me
Like strands of a myofibril,
Ever since things
Started to go downhill.
This makes me feel
Like everything wasn’t real.
It was just a fairytale
That has passed away.
From the admirers,
To the well-wishers,
To the long list of new friends,
To the new names I had to keep in my head.
All these were a farce
Firmly glued to the past.
I eventually realised
All these would go, with time and tide.
I had a friend that was ‘with me’.
Her name told the initial part of our story
But where did that smile she used to show me go?
The last time I saw it, was a long time ago
When I saw it,
There was also a guy she was with
The guy whose grades were at cloud 9.
This image tarried in my brain for sometime.
Maybe some friends stay only in the rainy season
And others when it’s dry, and the leaves are falling.
Some come when there’s sunshine
And some others during the night time.
When I started to voyage like a raindrop,
There was no one to hold me to a stop.
Echoes of ‘flash in the pan’
Were heard like the sound of a rickety ceiling fan.
I was like a farmer whose only fault
Was cultivating his land before the hailstorm.
My efforts, no matter how much
Were not enough.
My benefactors were angry
I started to see clearly.
Even my claim of being sick
Was just untenable and weak.
I moaned to myself
Every night before I slept,
“They were easier than breaking an egg!”
But it seemed like this egg was made from enamel.
My travail stuck to every part of me
It started to show, even in my sleep,
Because my ex-roommate told me one morning
That my sleep was filled with unusual lamenting
He said that I mumbled words that sounded like
“What is going on in my life?”
He also said my sleep was tainted with sorrow.
How the words came in my sleep, I still don’t know.
There was this church driver
Whose voice could get him into any choir
I shared a lot with him;
He used to be accommodating
But when the dark clouds came
I wasn’t the church car, but he drove me away
With his gestures,
And reactions.
There was this other crony I had in mind
The first of her kind.
She became an Irony of her name
I realised this in pain
She was a friend ‘I thanked God for’
But that stopped, when her distaste for me came to the fore.
Anytime I stayed near her
It seemed like I stank of rotten air
I asked myself
Was it because of my shirt?
Or was my deodorant bogus?
But no, that was not the cause
It didn’t take me too long to realise
That I really stank, not of a smell that was nice,
But of failure and disappointment
And our friendship was now resentment.
Even faith
Has lost faith,
And now wonders how far I’ll go
In this journey to permanently donning a ward coat.
Some friends had to go
But my parents stayed close,
Right by my side
Whether I was in ground zero, or in the skies.
Every student’s dream was now my own nightmare
The road to confidence was now the one to fear.
Fame was fading into notoriety
Admiration was morphing into sympathy.
”Should I end this all, with a rope,
Or should I still hope?”
My ability to go down memory lane like a hiker
Should tell you the answer.
If I continue to string my story
In a line of poetry,
My pen and paper, I fear,
Will be soaked with a large tear
The tear would have a recipe
Of pain and disbelief
Mixed with sadness
And a deficiency in self-confidence.
Some words are better written than said.
Some living people are better left dead
In my memory,
Because I knew them, only when things were shiny.