How My Lost Pen Came Back Finding Me

Thus set forth, half chemistry and half teaching work, the problem attracted me. I was reconsidering it that afternoon (it was a Thursday afternoon) as one of the noisy, sooty Sienna buses of Akure lugged me to Jos en-route Abuja. Now it happened that the evening of the same day destiny reserved for me a different and unique gift: the encounter with a woman, young and made of flesh and blood, warm against my side through our overcoats, gay in the misty cold of Rayfield-Jos, patient, wise and sure we were walking down streets still bordered with ruins from the religious crisis of 2012.

In a few hours, I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of tiredness borne from the 12-hours journey, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor; equally cured was suddenly the world around me, and exorcised the name and face of the woman who had gone down into lower depths to make Jos city a "home away from home" for me.

My very writing became a different adventure, no longer the dolorous itinerary of a convalescent, no longer the musings and wails about Buhari's administration but a lucid building, which was no longer solitary: the work of a chemistry-cum-mathematics teacher who weighs and divides, measures and infers on the basis of assured proofs and strives to answer questions..

Alongside the liberating relief of a rookie who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus in Dr. Julius Ehighe Osato's classes. It was exalting to search and find or create, the right word; that is commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.

"Paradoxically, any baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant"

Thanks in no-small measure to my "JOS CATERER", Oluwabukunmi Alabi