You, The Nomad
1.
When tourists talk about travelling, it is implied that they have a home to which they will return, somewhere to look forward to after every trip. But when nomads talk about travelling, it is different. They have not learned to travel and return home, they have learned to take home with them, to make it where they are, and where they are is but a transient juncture, a dot that disappears almost as soon as it is formed.
I grew up in a family of nomads, changing cities as often as we changed clothes. I learned to make friends of anyone willing to listen to me, to my stories, anyone willing to feel my pain and see life through my lenses, even if for a moment. I learned to store memories away in a jar, neatly tucked away in the past, never going back to it unless I absolutely need to because I have learned to live in the moment, knowing how fleeting it is.
I am still not certain if the memory I have of leaving Modakeke in 1996 — seeing that bare-chested man carrying the crate of soft drinks, watching the brown, sinuous dirt road fade into the horizon — is real, a fantasy, or a blurring of both by my brain in collusion with time. I was barely 2 years old, so how do I so vividly remember seeing the sun’s thick yellow blend in with the sky’s gentle blue. It must be a false memory, right? A misremembering of events?
It was my family’s first of 13 or so relocations before my 20th birthday. We crossed the country from Modakeke to Gbongan, to Iwo, to Warri, to Oguta, to Awka. By the time I was 6, we’d already lived in 4 different towns. By age 10, we’d moved 3 more times, including a 2-year stay in Uganda, East Africa. I changed schools 5 or 6 times before my parents shipped me off to boarding house in 2004. Each relocation uprooted us from our lives and transplanted us to a place we’d never heard of — the price of being a Pentecostal preacher in Nigeria.
There was never time to hug Erriga, Sarah, or Owotutu, my 3 friends from 3 different primary schools, or make promises to stay in touch. No time to form connections that should last a lifetime. I have learned to make friends who aren’t really friends, just acquaintances who must believe they are friends. Because friendship requires a long term commitment that my life is not designed to make. Some people try to stay in touch but soon learn that it is difficult to keep up with a moving train.
2.
The chameleon is a peculiar creature. It is always on the move, with eyes designed to dart around for prey but focuses intensely when the time comes. However, more peculiar is the chameleon’s ability to take on the colour of its environment, blend in without being seen, and mask its differences with normality.
When you grow up getting shuttled around, with no time to settle deeply into your environment, you master the art of chameleoning, changing your skin to blend into your environment without changing yourself, adapting yourself to a place without absorbing anything from without. You learn to form connections and move on from them quickly. You learn to interact deeply with people without knowing much about them or them knowing much about you. You learn to give people the illusion that they know you when they really don’t, because that’s the only way you can get anyone to commit to you. And you need that commitment because it’s the sickle that harvests trust. And what is life without trust?
All of these skills you acquire help you through a childhood riddled with temporalities. You learn to shapeshift, becoming who and what your environment wants you to be. Walking in and out of people’s lives without the burden of longevity. Until you become an adult. Then you must learn to deal with life on life’s terms. You must form genuine relationships, relationships that will last you a lifetime. You must learn to hold on to people. You must learn to teach people how to hold on to you. Because if you do not, you will die alone, and you do not want to die alone.
How do you explain to people that you love them, but that the moment they are out of your sight, you almost forget they exist because that’s how you’ve learned to cope with leaving and being left?
3.
When I think about travelling, it is something ephemeral, but it is also something permanent. I think about the ability to change places and take everything I am with me. I am where I am, and I am nowhere else. I live in the moment fully conscious of its fluidity and fully aware of the future's uncertainty. But what happens when life evolves, and this evolution demands that I become someone else, something else? Not something in the order of what I have been before, but something divergent, almost alien. What happens when life no longer requires from me the need to travel?
Think about it. How do you replace behaviour formed over 2 decades in less than 1? Do you take responsibility for the person you want to be without due regard for the potency of the person you currently are? Or do you just live life hoping you can adapt to your new reality, your need to settle down and embrace permanence, the same way you’ve learned to adapt to transience over the years? Can you, a nomad, take of yourself and become the very thing which you are not? Can… you?
