David Staley ran on a treadmill to make the Guinness Book of World Record. 1 Usain Bolt runs to bring triumph to his country and glory to himself; mostly breaking his own record over again. Jennifer Lopez ran to prepare herself for her role in The Hunger Games, she ran also to keep in shape; she ran because she loved to. Robert Naiman ran because the "rule" that fostered his perseverance of familial discontent and discomfort--that exception he perceived to stand in as a neutral point in his parents' violent marital struggle--was never present. So he ran when he realized that the rule he'd made by himself to brave his fear never was. He ran, away from home. He ran to escape.2 I believe life's a game, and in each level, we all have something we either run for or run from.

Sometimes, in the idyllic peacefulness of a star-lit night, when I feel subdued by my lofty dreams and carried afloat by my shortcomings, I close my eyes and I see myself running. But I've been saved the trouble of having to wonder of which direction because mine is a course that guides my steps by day and bugs my mind when I'm alone at night; I know why I run, I know why I ran. Robert and I, for the most part, share the same fate.

I ran from home when I was sixteen. I ran, firstly, because I had legs and will and therefore could. My second, and more ironclad, reason, however, is not so straightforward. It feels awkward to write so sensitively about someone who's very close and still alive, but if there's much I could do, it's to tell my story when I still can as the certainty of staying alive and whole is increasingly questioned by the things we hear, the things we see and especially those we don't see.

My father used to be a pastor--he still considers himself one, but I don't incorporate sleeping away from home and keeping other women, amongst other vices, in my definition of 'a man of the cloak'--and by most information I gather, which is more from hearing than any impressionable eye-witnessing, he had that gift of performing miracles that, in today's eyes, accredits its wielder more with charm than any allusion of power. What I remember, though, is seeing my father once every two weeks and his understanding of showing us love in fat bottles of minerals, thick wrappings of toys and a superfluous tendering of provisions. We’re five children and he loved us all. But he never, from what I both hear and have witnessed, had the least decent pointer of affection for my mother; he would later say, without a shame I wish he could feel, that he married her out of pity. And when I was only three, oblivious of the rapid change my life was about to witness, my father took me and my other four siblings away from my mother. He came off with a clean lie and told my mother that he was only taking us for a vigil, and that was it. There was no divorce, no legal separation, no formality. He just left. And he took us with him into the bosom of a strange woman who didn't remain strange for long.  We were young, too young.

I imagine my mother waiting for her kids over the balcony, wondering how a vigil could last three days straight, and then weeks that rolled into years. I imagine my mother waiting and, each time I do, I have to shoulder the jab of depression and anger, because the memories I've retained of my mother are tainted with scattered models of suffering, the tears she let flow when she finally saw me after so many years later and, lastly, death.

My mother passed away on November, two years ago.

After her children, the belongings followed, and soon, my mother was homeless with little to call hers, only to later be saved by the raggedness of an uncompleted building she shared with weed smokers, and much later, by the generosity of the church she attended. She finally lived in a two-room flat and struggled to get a small stall from which she survived. But when I desperately try to invoke images of what it must have really been like for her, I imagine my mother as a piece of a broken fragment struggling to find her other part. I imagine the frustration, the incredulity of looking around and meeting walls in place of five lovely little ones whom she carried nine months each in her womb. I let my imagination diverge and, at a point, it becomes as if I'm avoiding the part that hurts the most to remember or that I’m charting venues from my past to empathize with so as to justify my absence as if it’s possible to ever make up for not being there. Then I realize that I'm really avoiding to face the truth that it was really my mother who had stroke and the woman I later met, walking with the aid of a stick, was the woman I ran from home to see, the woman who’d without hesitation stick her hands into my butthole when my anus got stuck. I realize I'm playing the game the easiest way; I'm walking away from the truth. I feel I divest myself of personal independence when I say "I ran from home", because I don't think I've ever experienced "home". I really don't know which is home: my father's high-control house where captivity is the closest thing to making pleasantries and where we see and size up our world through the square of our windowpanes, watching childhood unfurl through the window but never being part of it? Or is it where my mother last lived, the two rooms that was stuffed with things I could no longer recognize?

Was there ever home? I wonder.

Living with my father and the new woman whom he said we should thenceforth call "mother", I never knew the struggles my mother had to deal with, perhaps because, at that time, my internal struggle to be free foremost from myself was sufficient for me, or perhaps it was that my father had channeled our growing-up to include everything but memories of my mother.

But my mother was a woman who loved with all she could give and had a devout trust in what God could do, and she started to visit at the early years of our imbalanced separation, careful not to infuriate my father even though my father would go into his room whenever she visited and leave a model warning to us, the children: "If I see you acting like an idiot in front of her, I'll beat the hell out of you." And by "acting like an idiot", he meant leaning close and smiling effusively to our own mother, and my father being one of those fathers who openly demand fear in favor of respect from their children, his warning was in our minds like Adele's Hello in heartbroken lovers’. My father is also one of those parents who find uncomplimentary names a befitting substitute for their children’s birth names.  “Idiot”, “Goat”, “Stupid boy”, “Fool”, “Beast with no heart”, these words roll out of his mouth like a fascinating old-school song he’s very unwilling to forget.

But nature prevailed and we began to grow, old enough to know when it was a call to run and when to pause for a breather, and when to just keep running till we were out of breath. I am the third of the five children and my elder brother was the first to leave. Like Robert, he ran away. We had all gone for our school's end-of-the-year's party without my elder brother and my father. As was the plan, we had all expected our big brother to show up, but he never did and we returned to an apartment occupied only by my father. According to what my father had told us in that his characteristically brash manner, my brother had preferred he wore an all-white tracksuit to the occasion while my father had found a double-breasted jacket better. They'd both insisted and he'd chased my brother out of the house. Of course, my brother never returned.

This logic may not sound intuitive but my brother, as was all of us, was tired of standing, tired of viewing the world in ugly squares, tired of calling a woman who never breast-fed any of us "mother". So he ran. Running, I believe, seemed as a form of redemption to him, as a means to return to his existential self. Running was the only way to find peace for himself. We'd all once gone to visit my mother--without my dad and the other woman of course. My brother knew where our mother stayed. So I believe that accommodation was no worry to him and I know that he’d been long in finding a clear shot for ducking out on all of us. I was, and I still am, glad he did.

Barely two years after that, my mother, under the advisement of a close friend, visited and implored my father to release my sister to her (by this time, she didn't have stroke). My sister was a sickle-cell victim and before then, she'd undergone frightful symptoms of the disease but much of the treatment she'd received was beclouded by a stubbornly short-sighted collection of information, on my father's part of course. She'd once walked blindly into a busy expressway. She'd once given up the ghost, but several slaps from my father and helpless paroxysm of prayers had given back breath enough to keep her alive. I remember pressing my ears to her mumblings when she’d revived and hearing something like, “Okay, I’ll enter. I’ll enter.” In that hurried moment of frantic blur, we’d immediately concluded that it had to be a supernal being telling her to step into a grave, so with as much simultaneity as we could, we’d screamed into her ears to tell whoever was at the other end of that dark world that she wasn’t going in. But it was only when my father took her to the hospital that we found out she’d lost her sense of hearing. The hospital could diagnose nothing and this gave us the first indication that the whole ordeal could be more than the effects of sickle-cell, so we’d had our prospect leaned more on the spiritual side of things. My sister was alive but she could not talk, hear nor eat for a week. Like I said, my father loved his children and he did everything he thought he could.

But I don't think any mother will hear such things of her child and not brave all gripes and do whatever she thinks best. When my mother had come to ask for my sister, my father had seen the perfect opportunity to rub everything in her face, so he'd asked my sister with that impetuous inflection to his voice to choose whom she would like to stay with. But he'd only asked because we, for fright of what might happen if we showed the slightest love for our mother, always nodded in affirmation to his condemnation of our mother-he made a great deal of casting a slur on her often. So he'd believed his confidence unchallenged when he'd asked my sister to choose.

My sister had chosen my mother.

And my father let her go with a shrug that said, "You'll regret this. You'll return and beg me."

My sister never returned, and soon, I finished high school and it was my turn to leave. To run. My sister's was an aided run, but I was left to my devices. I was alone but for two younger brothers.

Our "departure from home" may sound organized, but it was most surely born from a desire to set something right, and that something had more to do with ourselves than anything else. In essence, we outgrew passivity. By prayers and strong will, my sister is presently a sickle-cell survivor (miracles still happen). And yes, it’s a miracle.

I, on the other hand, ran from home to see my mother and because I'd stayed two years out of high school doing nothing. My father would not allow me get any entry-level works because “the other woman” who had become his wife had somehow made him believe that none of his children would feed him. In those two years of waiting and sizing up the outside world, looking became laborious and the Oxford English Dictionary became my oasis, the sanctuary I’d consecrated for myself where sights were replaced by words so beautiful that they fashioned the sights I longed to see, and unlike as the testimonies of many writers present, I found my writer self not in the intriguing pages of fictional and non-fictional books, but in the exhaustive leaves of a complete dictionary.

A day came that everything seemed clear like the dawning of a revelation that was always present but never acknowledged, like it was just the best time for the best thing that would happen to me, the best time for freedom. I had a concept and I had a plan, because my mother was still alive and the sky was blue. So just after the sky left dews atop the blades of grasses, I dropped a letter on the side couch for my father, kissed my brothers farewell and ran. It was a long distance from where my mother stayed and even though the morning had still not shed its veil of murkiness at that time, I'd mastered the roads and had waited out dawn on a public coach station. By the first glimpse of the clouds, I was already beside my mother, sharing her tears and straddling a new world I was, and am still, yet to fathom. My mother’s effortless entreaty for me to return to my father’s place was appareled with wistful concerns about her inability to get me into the university or be of much help at all as she could hardly manage a really cool meal-by today’s standard-with my sister alone. But I remember now the way she threw herself back on the bed when she saw me, rubbed her eyes to make sure I was real, hugged the breath out of me, and I realize now as I did then that I couldn’t have given being with my mom for the whole world. There was no better place.

My mother's death took my plan with it and I was left with only a concept. I ran 'safely' because I had a sure stamina. It never crossed my mind that that stamina could be taken from me anytime, so I never bothered to find anything else to lean on. And now, I have to deal with the nosy annoyance of my relatives (they stifle my passion and dampen my curiosity, I think) and sometimes I just wish everything can just roll away and I'm left in a world harbored by me alone. But no one understands. Sometimes, I, too, don't understand. Sometimes, I do. At least I think I do.

I grew up in the unruliness of Lagos and I’d never once explored the exterior of the southwest, but the conclusion of my mother’s burial and the irritant interference of concerned relatives conveyed me across the southwest and into the fast-paced, money-driven, ambition-laden world of the Ibos, my people. I was among those Igbo children whose understanding of their hometown was fraught with factitious illustrations of wicked uncles and jealous aunts and barren lands and retrogressively thinking people. It actually took my mother’s burial to know my hometown. It took her death to take me to the east of Nigeria; Onitsha of Anambra precisely. But before Onitsha, there was what I’d like to call a wish-washy reunion.

My father took me and my sister in to live with him again because we were the ones our mother left behind (by this time, my elder brother was in Enugu, eking out a livelihood as a performing DJ).  My father took us in not as a move triggered by a haunting feeling of remorse or an extraction from the benefit of hindsight but as a move graced in selfishness and an effort to be seen as doing the right thing. His was one of obligation than any real concern, and subsequent days proved it. Because I and my sister were the ones who’d gone to see our mother, he was unwilling to let us interact freely with our two younger brothers.

And one day, he picked up a nail-adorned wood and hit me till I could no longer feel my hands and threatened my sister’s life, too, but not before he called me into his room and, with the cold assurance of an even colder vow, averred to one day stab me. By the end of that day, I was all strafed skin and broken bones. But by the end of that day, I was also miles away from his house, strapped with my belongings and walking alongside my sister. For the second time, we were running from ‘home’, only that that time we did it together. My relatives, whose slant are more balanced into the business side of life in comparison to any formal education, orchestrated my conveyance into the hidebound world that was Onitsha, then into its Main Market which is one of the largest market in west Africa; a market that stinks of underhanded businesses and blubbery stories that emphasized the heartlessness we humans can exhibit when the object of contention involves the thick wads of money.

I was sent to Onitsha to learn a trade, and I met many other boys who shared similar fate, and we all bore the umbrella word, “Nwaboy”3 which, to me, is just an embellishment to its equivalent, slavery. Because, for a promise of getting freedom and some amount of money or a stall of goods in return, each Nwaboy assumes a mechanical body that works ceaselessly and stays indoors when not working, and bleeds internally when not being scolded at. I feel it’s necessary to point out that we were not houseboys as many may want to identify us with (because we lived with these men and their family-if they had one-and from their houses go to the workplace they own). We were, in each Nwaboys’ characterization, suffering from a culture we didn’t wish our younger ones to get in association with.

I remember mornings when I wake up feeling like a total failure, as if at my own behest, I’d lost my way. I also remember the times I wake up at night and feel incomplete and “stolen” from myself, and I certainly know what tears feel like at dawn. My stay was riddled with silent rebellion on my part and occasionally hearing words that were funny and yet biting in their amusement. For instance, I was once seen dancing in my room and my boss had asked, “If you look back at your past, what reason do you have to dance?”

I would many times look back at those words when I feel down and out and find a way to identify with the evident amusement in it. Sometimes, it proves to be the right medication, and other times, I’m not just so lucky and the words turn completely upside down and its full implication hits me right in the face.

There are times I also find impossible to forget; those moments when the popular feeling of camaraderie enveloped me, especially when we, the Nwaboys, wheeled kegs of water downhill the jagged streets of Omagba Phase II. We’d begin to draw up comparisons about who worked the more like a slave. “After fetching this water now, I’ll go wash madam’s4 cloths, then wash plates, then mop the floors, then wash the toilets,” someone would say with the look of one expecting to win a great admiration.

“Only those ones? Me, after doing all those your own, I’ll still cook and wash both oga5 shoes and oga car,” another person will say with a tone clearly intended to outmatch the previous person’s list.

It was a brave thing that despite returning from a work where we may have to stand all day to complete all of these tasks at our master’s house and despite the complain of waist pain and nicked palms rife among the Nwaboys, we found a way to detach from our grievances and laugh about things we’d usually not laugh about. And even though we found our collective succor in vain comparisons and good-natured arguments, it was enough. Permit me to say it was almost impossible to have a lasting conflict with a fellow Nwaboy, because as I’ve come to learn, in suffering there’s unification.

My biggest gripe, though, is with my relatives. They’d discussed and decided my fate privately and we had been only two states away from Anambra before they told me where they were taking me to and what I was going there to do. If I had been given the smallest gesture of importance by being consulted before taken to Onitsha, I still will today not have gone beyond the southwest. So I’m indifferently happy for the experience, for being part of a new world, and although my happiness is occasionally tainted by recollections of my shortcomings-especially when I remember being mocked at by my friends because I couldn’t concisely speak Igbo, my language-I would rather look at the Big Picture, even though I’m sometimes unsure about what that means.

It’s understandable that these friends who laughed at my difficulty in speaking Igbo are stanch backers of the separatist southeast region which represents the established parts of what remained of Biafra from the 1967-1970 Biafra war. I’ve seen firsthand the fierceness exhibited by pro-Biafran supporters and I’m afraid it’s one of a people than don’t seem the least inclined to give in to, or tolerate, any factor that may tamper with their desire for a State independent from Nigeria. It’s in this spirit that they say that if another war comes, my difficulty in speaking Igbo would be a major disfavor to me. They feel enraged because they have heard about the brutality the Nigerian military meted out to their innocent brothers during the war, and so they feel justified in seeking another war. I do not.

I returned to Lagos only last month because I made a choice to extricate myself from such oppression even though where I may lay my head was very uncertain and I chose not to think about the modern slavery many boys in the east have to endure which is causal of first, the off-base governance of the country. But I’ve realized I can’t really forget the haunted nights and the mechanical days, the captivity and the endless reel of strangled stories. I may have emancipated myself, but I have this medium of writing to tell my stories and those of many others. But I’ve also come to realize that the people whose story I want to tell have long embraced their fate, and most sadly, have deemed it a culture. These Igbo people, my people. I weep for them.

Strangely, I’m at the verge of being homeless and I look past the people who never seem to understand and I see where it all began to fall apart; I ran, but not too far away. I ran safely, too close to ‘home’, and I’m still within the reach of my past, and though I’ve never seen anyone fall in a track race and still come back to win, I believe impossibility is nothing just as nothing is impossible. Perhaps mine is a 400m race and I can still surely make it.

They say we all are born for a reason and it’s for us to find that reason. So I think: maybe all this running around is just a means to find my own purpose. Or maybe I’ve lost my path and it’s finding my way back that’s very complex.

But I now understand why God is irritated by people who are neither “cold” nor “hot”: when you’ve chosen to walk, by all means walk comfortably, but when you choose to run, there’s no safe running, you just have to run hard enough, and if life's placed anyone in a level where they have to run from something, I think running safely would be less actionable than crawling.

My elder sister-our only sister-ran safely but was shielded by her feminism and she’s now a schoolteacher. My elder brother really took his race to heart and still works as a performing DJ. The form of freedom I sought has, like a kite in the wind, flapped itself away from me, but I persevere. Because if I don't persevere for myself, no one will. Because sometimes the walls are not too high. Because, against all rigid restraints, my feet has remained and if there's ever a need to run like this again, my sprints would take me to the shoreline of my aspirations.

And because the thrills of running are worth hanging around for.

Footnotes:

1.  Man Breaks Guinness World Record By Running Nearly 82 Miles On A Treadmill Over 12 Hours. Published by Daily Mail Online of 3 August 2015.
2.  It Gets Better: The Day I Ran Away From Home by Robert Naiman. Published on http://www.commondreams.org
3.  A name similar in usage and application to the “boy” word the Americans used as a way of demeaning black men who were slaves, given to Igbo boys who learn trades from businessmen.
4.  A name given to a female boss in Nigerian parlance.
5.  A name given to a male boss in Nigerian parlance.