The World Will Go on Without You
I’m nodding off to sleep on the train.
I haven’t slept in two days
Too unsettled to gather any thoughts
If I’m unavailable, a lot would go wrong of course.
I haven’t stopped to think
Not a single bother about my self
My health? What is that even?
I’m checking all the boxes. The pound is flowing in.
Surely, I must be all that matters.
Everyone else must need me to live
There’s no time to pause; to be human
To step out of my ego,
And see the world from outside my head
How could they live if I’m gone?
I am too much the centre of it all
I know there’ll be no smiling and laughing
Or could there be? I wonder.
“Do you not know what happens after your funeral? In a few short hours, the crying will die down, and your family is going to start making arrangements to feed your relatives and your friends. Some of your relatives are going to be discussing current events as they eat jollof rice, chicken and salad; and some people will call your family to tell them that they can’t make it in person because of some emergency. Other people are going to start making travel arrangements to go back to their own homes because life is just too short. And someone in your family is going to start arguing that they contributed more financially than others did.
Eventually the crowd is going to go their separate ways. And every once in a while, your cell phone would ring from people that didn’t realise that you had died. In a few days, your children will go back to work. Your employer will begin to search for your replacement. There will be new elections, new scandals, and the traffic on the 3rd mainland bridge will be the same. The super eagles will play their games just as planned. In six months, your spouse will be watching a comedy on DSTV and she’ll start laughing.
The first anniversary of your passing will be celebrated in a grand manner. You will be forgotten at an astonishing pace. Everyone’s life will go back to normal. But in a blink of an eye, years are going to have gone by. There will be very few people left to remember you…”
