Hello there, dear! Happy Sunday! How did the past week go?
This Sunday, I’ll be sharing a piece that will provoke you into a fairly long period of thinking. It’s titled, The Boy Next Door.
The Boy Next Door
A boy moves into the room next to ours in our university’s staff quarters.
‘Hi, my name is Lolu.’
‘Welcome here, Lolu. My name is Barnabas. I hope you enjoy your stay like we have.’
Other welcome greetings follow from our other neighbours.
Soon, we forget that the boy next door’s name is Lolu.
We forget what his shake feels like.
So we resort to calling him ‘Bro’ or, in our gossips, ‘The boy next door.’
So we resort to waving hello once in a while.
The boy next door is a stammerer!
Can you believe we do not know until a full moon, after his coming, has sat majestically in the heavens?
So we resort to completely avoiding having long, serious conversations with him
And we start to leave notes containing long, serious pieces of information.
The boy next door buys a home theatre and blares loud music. His voice louder than the home theatre and his tone harsher than the wannabe hip-hop singers he listens to, we caution him against disturbing our peace. The boy next door, we later realize, does not groove to those songs, he cries under them. So, after we caution him and the reign of silence begins, our detective ears start to pick daily rations of sorrowful tears, which though hush, still cannot escape the capture of our ears.
The boy next door keeps late nights like a man of the night’s watch. He always clenches a white nylon of fried rice and chicken.
‘The boy next door must be rich,’ we say after watching this go on for weeks.
The boy next door gets harassed by SARS but we hear nothing of it. The boy next door carries over five courses but we have no idea. The boy next door loses his aunt who’s been taking care of him to the hands of the cancer that snatched both of his parents but we will be unconcerned when we see his teary eyes and see him lock himself up for days.
The boy next door is terribly sick. We do not know. But then, our sniffers pick the smell of heavy Jaja dosage.
‘He’s taking medication; he doesn’t need us to disturb him.’
‘He’s probably asleep; it will be wrong to mess with his healing process.’
We continue to speak our way out of asking after him, of caring for him. The boy next door goes out and never returns. Or so we think until we start to perceive the weirdest odour emanating from his room. We break the door of the boy next door and do not find him because the real him has departed to realm of the undying. We check his dustbin and find many notes that the boy next door addresses to us but which he never delivers to us.
‘I’m sick; can you boil me hot water?’
‘I just lost my aunt, the flicker of light left for me.’
‘Can you cash out 2k with this ATM card? The pin is’
We see that the boy next door only stopped short of giving his pin because of the futility of it. We weep profusely.
.
.
.
A boy moves in to the room next to ours in our university’s staff quarters.
‘Hi, I’m Charles.’
‘Welcome here, Charles. I’m Barnabas. I think we will be best friends.’
Charles laughs and says, ‘It’s funny; that’s exactly what all the other neighbours said to me.’
Fantbabs
Have a beautiful week!
fantbabs 
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