Quiet is what you are on arrival. As you step off the last vehicle on your six-hour journey to a place you’ve heard nothing good about. Thankfully, you didn’t come alone. You’re with your band of merry women: a feisty product manager who you’ll later accept to be your sister to please the plethora of observers who assume you both to be twins. There’s the reserved-looking lady who has a way of scolding you with a stare through her Dior glasses. Finally, there’s another lady, whose stare is often reserved for her phone screen. You pass through a series of officials at the gate. One takes an unwelcome interest in you when he discovers your alma mater. He admires you. You wish for his reasons to be confined to a sense of respect for your being and tenacity, but being is commonplace and tenacity cannot be glimpsed through documents. It turns out your alma mater has a reputation for churning out people with sizeable wallets, and your admirer is well aware. Hence the name he’ll give you for the remainder of your stay: Covenant.
You make your way to a registration centre and find your place on a line that’s too long for comfort. However, you use the time to look around. Nothing is interesting because nothing is supposed to be. The people are unknown, though the facilities are familiar – rekindling memories of your time in a boarding school in the middle of nowhere. You heard about the sorry state of the facilities before you got there, but nothing could prepare you for the pit latrines which also double as bathrooms, as well as the congested room you have to share with thirty-nine other youths. ‘Youths’ has a different meaning for you here. All your life, you’ve been around people who looked like teenagers. You look like a teenager yourself – at least that’s what the others say. Now you see youths who look like they should’ve been married twice before.
The line finally shrinks to a point where you’re next, but there’s a sudden shuffle and she takes your spot. You’re not bothered; you’re in no rush. She turns back to apologise for the wrong she thinks she’s done, and that’s when you get a proper view of her face. She’s beautiful – not in an elegant cheekbone supermodel way – but in a cute schoolgirl way. For some reason, this face follows you for the rest of the day. Her voice is in your ears when you go create your bank accounts, collect your apparel, and fill in another one of those dreaded forms asking too many questions. When you complete the process, you bid her farewell, not thinking you’d see her again. But as with the rest of your initial assumptions about the next three weeks, that’d be wrong.
Quiet is what you wish you had in the mornings but don’t. The trumpet is your regulator. It tells you when to eat, sleep, attend lectures, train, parade, meditate, and sometimes socialise. If the trumpet didn’t start your day, your roommates would. They’d get up earlier than necessary in a way that’ll make you wonder if they’re anticipating the day or avoiding the night. On one of these days, you find yourself on kitchen duty, trying to pursue your imagination of being a chef, but you’re made to wash coolers, sweep drainages, and occasionally carry bags of rice and garri. On the bright side, you get to wear an apron and serve food to the populace. It makes for nice pictures by the way.
While you’re dishing out dinner, you see her again. It takes you a minute to remember her name, but once you do, you continuously scream it in a way that makes her nervous. It’s a pleasant sequence: you see a cute face, you scream the name of its owner, it blushes and gets even cuter, which makes you want to scream it even more. You try to use your omniscient chef privileges and give her more food than usual, but the bureaucrats stop you from doing that, so she gets only one piece of meat instead of the four you intended. You’re not worried. You’ve taken a mental picture of where she sits during lectures, and on the next one, she’s the first person you find as you arrive. Numbers are exchanged, hands are shaken, and in due time you both flirt with the possibility of being something other than friends. All this happens against the backdrop of a minor emotional crisis which alters your idea of social relationships.
Quiet is what you need after a series of disappointments. A month ago, you sent a text to a friend you cared about. You apologised for not texting sooner and asked all the questions you could to catch up on what’s changed since you last met. After a month, she decides to open it, despite being available all the while. You open your chat app to the most pleasant surprise of her long overdue response. You don’t bother reading. You long-press on your chat history with said friend and proceed to click the trash icon. As though a matter of coincidence, you do this for two other ‘friends’ guilty of the same slight. Maybe they were just too busy. No use jostling for their attention meant for other things.
Another friend chooses never to speak to you again because you implied her to be a pick-me girl. She brings your mind to the insensitivity of your words, especially since she’d just been accused of being one by her ex. She claims you played on her insecurities and assures you through a mutual companion that she’s said her last words to you. Quiet is what you choose to be for a moment before replying with an ‘Okay.’ You haven’t spoken since.
You used to believe friendships were mini love stories, based on nothing but a sense of altruism people had for one another. Now you’re not so sure. Altruism now sounds like an imaginary concept hatched in the think tanks of idealists coming up with ways to make the world a little less awful. Everyone’s ‘altruistic’ till it’s time to make a sacrifice. Everyone is a ‘friend’ until being one requires intentionality. Until distance makes communication a bit more difficult. Until it requires them to take their attention off guilty pleasures for a few minutes to have a conversation with someone they can’t see. Until they get an honest opinion without the sugarcoat. Quiet is how you are while you contemplate the inevitably transactional nature of friendship in the 21st century. It’s what gives you peace amidst the turmoil you feel from having your naivete torn apart.
After sourcing the opinions of people you respect on this, you redefine your relationships with people. You understand the purpose of emotional walls keeping people out. Vulnerability is like handing a gun to another person, then standing in front daring them to pull the trigger. More often than not, they do.
Hence, quiet is what you choose to be about the extent of your feelings for Cute Schoolgirl. You keep the gun in your pocket, and your walls up. You question the authenticity of your affection for a lady you didn’t know eighteen days ago. You both have reservations about your feelings for one another, occasionally letting something slip through the cracks in your concrete fences. You see it in your texts. How you both claim the other affects your focus when your eyes meet. How the hugs tend to linger for much longer than necessary but end faster than desired. Outsiders consider you to be a couple, but you can’t afford to be quiet when they ask directly, so you settle for nervous shrugs and polite laughter. Neither of you want to put a finger on it. The ambiguity, however frustrating, is also soothing. It’s safe. It ensures the walls remain where you want them.
The final day of camp is one to tie up loose ends. Those who’ve never gone out do so. Numbers get exchanged at a higher rate than ever. Friends sit together on the field for make-believe picnics. Maybe there’s something to having light-hearted conversations under the stars. Couples avoid the stars for the dark spots where they can pour their hearts out, have their first or final kiss, make ill-fated plans for their future, or even hand over their guns, praying their partner won’t shoot. You don’t explicitly state you want to see her, but at this point, it’s a no-brainer. This might be the night you move past the hugs and subtle handholds. This might be the night where you lower your guard a bit to tell her how much influence she has on you. This might be the night she does the same. But first, she suggests you follow her to a photographer’s place so she can pay for her pictures. Delay isn’t denial. The night’s young, and you have enough of it to yourselves. On your way there, she slips and falls amongst some broken objects. The pain has her screaming for assistance. You take her to the clinic where she gets some pain relief. She’s badly hurt and has to be taken to her room immediately for rest. Before she leaves, she makes you aware that she had plans to see a certain guy that same evening. You know this guy. You know he’s interested in her and has had a weird reception to you ever since he saw you with her. A sense of jealousy or possessiveness makes you question why she had agreed to see someone else on a night that was supposed to be yours. She says she didn’t technically agree to see him, she just didn’t disagree either. Quiet is what follows her response. She’s injured and that’s what matters at the moment. Hurt feelings and potential poachers be damned.
By the morning, she’s nearly recovered. She thanks you for your help the previous night and gives you the usual too-long-for-causal-too-short-to-matter hug. You’re both speechless after that. Neither one of you wants to say something too uncertain to count as truth. One thing you both have in common is your apparent unwillingness to make false promises. You let yourselves go, settling for the hopeful ‘See you when I see you’ declaration.
In the aftermath, you scroll through your chat and see a promise you made on one of your finer days:
I like you, but I’m afraid to tell you because I don’t know what it’ll mean. We might not see each other in a year or two. We might reach our homes and realise we only gravitated towards one another out of availability. The possibility of losing you is a thought that’s hard to bear, but the moments we’ve spent will make the pain bittersweet (if it comes at all). So I’ll ride this train to the place we can’t see, and I’ll take a bite out of your optimism just this once. Just this once.
Quiet is the nature of the smile you give yourself after reading this. After realising your hypocrisy these past weeks. The gun left your pocket a while back. It’s been in her hand all along. She just didn’t shoot.