Pidgin

By

George O. Obikoya

Now that matters seem not headed my way is when someone says my life needs reworking his way, and another doting not to counsel me, actually more focused on the nuances of my idiom, which he says must intrigue sophisticates. It is the more enigmatic that even in chaos my taste for the inane would dismiss the inner key that is the well of my gloom.

To reckon amity on the frailty of my desire to tell all of my soul which, given its nearness to my professed view that some may deem hard to comprehend, is itself phenomenal as the effort seems to sap the relic of my now pervasive wateriness. This precludes that even so battered, the soul is vanquished. Far from it, for being just attenuated in form it seems it must confound even itself to regain its vigour.

It is though unsure that to now conform to limpidness of my awareness would purge the paradox it sires even in inertia, to which that an event that morning must nullify preset notions on the immutability of consciousness, attests. Yet for now the task is at first glance unlike, even as it lends credence to the ongoing saga that a tired soul struggles to change into an effigy of faith that even so ballyhoos its nerve, being universal.

Everyone is there that needs to be. The calmness is palpable from the moment the entrance splits, as though to wallop me in a charade of bourbon craze an outward civil tonality belies. It is evident that the ambient welcomes its ilk, parts of the tuxedo of the usher semblance of a waggle in its sartorial grace, as it seems the genteel assemblage must see it. To be sure, mine too is close, a fictional allure for amity that fits the occasion inside a soul dying to lope.

It is though clearly too late to bolster it with a dated event even if merely hours prior. The guest speaker at a ball of a league of notables is unlikely one to assume compliance by the audience to makeup by a forlorn sage, even likewise confused, as the interest in imbibing as it seems the vernacular would imply. To imagine the cacophony in me teasing out all these is wholesome, some would say, given that the honour emanates from tested souls.  

It is tough for me to reconcile one affirmed sagacious being cerebrally challenged, even with my subdued mental state, which would likely appal my earthier audience, expressed. So, to brace to be square seems nonnegotiable, after all, it is not exactly that the issues have become sufficiently clear to me to warrant the gusto vital to alarm in a gilded hall with one perhaps huffy enough to shove me aside.

Even if likelier to heighten the risk of choking on the delicacies downed with vintage wine all around me, my intention is to thrill an audience with such grace to risk an earful of assumed sting. For sure it reeks to some of worn atavism many shun. Others consider the club the epitome of confusion that even so the academia inculcates ostensibly to thwart in fact nurtures, an arrested evolution many struggle to restart unsure where to start again, and with no terminal in sight.

To articulate being embedded in my first tongue as not enough to stymie a drive to rid my existential angst seems the easier to address of the issues crisscrossing my tortured soul as it surveys the multiplicity of flavours and their origins, stripping itself of presumption, to comprehend the purity of its awareness. Indeed, it is pointless emphasizing the very reason some in the audience may have considered me suited to address it to start with, that is being so embedded.  

The speeches soon start in dimness, which unsettles to feel the scrutiny of the kliegs that makes the podium seem a setting where the task is to find a vase in a maze, time ticking, and my prospects of success derailed. Then, jolted by the event earlier in the day thrust in my imagination, my inspiration rekindled, the moments to my turn to speak increasingly seem endless. With no choice than to wait, the thoughts have enough time to crystallize for the maze to no longer demoralize.  

It now befuddles me to have to escape faced with what now seems an expected outcome of the process perceived in ways saleable even to an elite guild. Perhaps my paternalistic instincts color my perception of the purity of my consciousness or may be even in turn, the path to our progress so dear to my soul, which now must manifest its naturalness to ever be convincing. Further, it is reassuring that the opportunity to answer the question my son posed that morning is intact.

Even more so is the reception my speech seems to receive given the ovation occasioned by almost every one of my peculiar words. It is the blend of the comic amidst the gentry literally that must seem odd to the faint eye, the very nature of things that seems not so impregnable to me after all. That it has taken me so long to figure though humbles an indication of the need to persevere against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Just as my vernacular is instantly creolized so does the process evolve in my audience and indeed, others, whose existential mix moves them further along the same path as mine, my somewhat protracted speech stressed, my listeners though seemingly apathetic to being well past the time allotted to me.

It is clear that we operate at different stages in the evolution of the process and that eventually we head for the same endpoint, when the idioms would blend and we would communicate with one voice. As with my response to my teenage son on return home that evening, no one knows when we will get to that end point, but it may be sooner than we imagine at the moment.

Something that seems sure enough though, and which the outcome of my speech earlier in the day seems to validate, is that we will get there, someday.