pauses (,) and periods (.)

I remember my four years of university in scenes, some prosaic, some profound.

A night during O-Week, lying on a beanbag in some guy’s flat whom I had never met before. People strewn around the floor like sweet wrappers, a hookah pipe travelling around the room like a prostitute among desperate men. Strange music, strangers everywhere, pretending they – we – are already friends. (We’re still not).

Getting back my first Media Studies essay, bludgeoned by a red pen and a confidence-crushing 58%. Growing a thicker skin there and then, appreciating the lecturer’s acerbic wit over my own “Modernity is a multifaceted term that refers to a period in the....” jargon. (I still don’t understand what modernity is).

Watching the first ever episodes of Desperate Housewives in a marathon session, all six of us crammed on or at the foot of my friend’s single bed. I&J chicken fillets roasting on an illegally imported mini-grill that could get us expelled from res. Stolen posters from the cinema for wallpaper. Eating off paper plates instead of dinnerware, sitting on overturned boxes instead of dining room chairs. No curfews, no rules of decorum. Such small but sweet freedoms.

Walking to Pick ‘n Pay on a Sunday morning to get breakfast. Watching with bemusement as a dude runs out of the pub in his birthday suit, flashing cars, and high-fiving strangers. After seeing people diving into bushes “for fun”, and racing in the “naked mile” after taraweeh, nothing short of phenomenal displays of stupidity can surprise me anymore. (I do still appreciate Chuck Norris jokes though).

Interviewing Akin Omotoso over lunch; my first big journalistic assignment. He bought me juice and gave me ten pages worth of story in between bites of pasta. What began as a textbook interview became an earnest conversation between absolute strangers that is as rare as it is rich. (The only thing I did wrong was forget to ask for an autograph.)

Putting together my final multimedia portfolio over the past few weeks, all the while love-hating the exhilaration of getting technology to adhere to my whims. Each menu button, each edited video clip is a tiny, pathetic, necessary victory. Slave to the machine, I eat jelly tots for supper, curse like a truck driver and press the proverbial pause button on my life until it’s all over. (It is and it isn’t).

Now is that time in my life when people start blurting inanities.

“You’ve finished university. Now you have to enter the real world,” they say, equating my last four years and all its lessons to a measly pair of fake Pumas.

“It’s the end of the road for you. A new journey begins,” they philosophise, as if our past, present and future are separate highways.

I am not overwhelmed by this “end” because I don’t really believe in it. Life is just a long string of sentences, each experience separated by commas, until God inscribes the big fat full stop.