Ayomide Babaleye

Dusk to dawn and dawn back to dusk, my round buttocks resides in this chair. This white, plastic chair whose hands have both been removed by small, firm legs that jump on it for play. The white is gradually becoming a pale grey colour and though it still has its four legs, it wobbles and almost always throws me down. I know because I bought it myself. Tunde and Temitayo, his twin sister I have warned severally to play with the other toys that abound everywhere in the house but, no, they choose my personal hang out, my own chair as their ferris wheel and swing. Tell me, how wont it break?

I like to sit close to the window while it rains. The comforting smell of nature mixed with the fragrance of pure heavenly water always figures how to beckon on me. I am lucky I live upstairs where the rain hits hard on the roof and that sound, which I move my legs to remind me of my Tope whose drum sticks broke my pot. I refused to buy him a drum set and he went AWOL. What manner of child that is, I have no idea. But, its not his fault. Its Enitan, his mother's fault. Spoiling this trio anyhow and bringing them to me to spend the holidays with. I am the only one who can tolerate mad children, she thinks. She thinks because they went to America, common America, they had the right to turn their children into wild animals.

Oladayo, my assistant has even gotten tired of this children and whenever she has the time, she will lock them in the "cell" for inappropriate behaviour while she walks down the road with me to have a feel of the atmosphere. She has done that today again and now, I'm walking down the road with her. The beautiful Dayo. She is the only thing I once had that I still have. Since my sister left me and taught that these her rascals were a consolation for her never visiting and my husband, long disappeared from the surface of my life never giving my a call, Dayo has stuck to me like glue on paper. The way I love the girl.

She says all roses are red but, no, I know they aren't. Why argue with a scholar like me? I read about all those things. Biochemistry in the University of Ibadan and she still has the mind to argue with me?

I can keep on talking and talking and talking because well, that's the only thing I can do now. Rant on and on and on about everything I used to know which I'm no longer sure of.

I don't have kids. They are all dead. Dayo is my only child. Well, apparently. I only have my mouth and my years of experience as my defence.

Life is not easy for a lady like me. You would think my life is just like yours but, really, it isn't.

I cant see anything but, I know when I'm done, Dayo, would come and edit my work and send to the magazine where she got me a job as a freelancer.

This is me, Ayomide Babaleye, the blind thirty year old lady that lives down Olatunbosun Close, Isolo, Lagos.