Through the Window

I used to bring books on every journey. Pages to absorb myself into, worlds to disapppear inside, anything to avoid looking out the window at the brutal honesty of the road and also to avoid being pissed at the way a lot of people use their entire hours travelling to make small talks about others and then go on to complain that they're not progressing in life because of the government. . But one day I forgot my book and my devices were all low, or maybe I just got tired of fiction, and I looked outside. Really looked. And I haven't been able to stop since.

I'm sort of catching myself using the world ‘EXHIBIT"‘ more frequently these days, maybe it's a sign that my dream of being a legal practitioner might still manifest,lol. But let's get right into it.

EXHIBIT ONE: The Girl with Oranges On a Tray

She couldn't have been more than nine. Maybe younger or older? Malnutrition has a way of stealing years, making bodies smaller than they should be, making childhood look like something that expired before it ever really began. She balanced a stainless of oranges on her head, the kind of balance that comes from necessity, not talent. Ripe oranges. The kind that would burst if you pressed too hard, that would stain your fingers with sweetness you'd smell for hours after. The tray had a motif design that also took me back to CCA years in junior secondary school.

She moved between cars during the traffic, her feet bare and dusty, her ankara gown tight around a frame that looked like it was built from wishes instead of meals. And I wondered: Does she go to school? Does she know how to read? Does she dream, or has hunger taught her that dreaming is a luxury she can't afford?

I wondered if she looks at girls her age in school uniforms and feels envy or relief. Relief that she doesn't have to pretend to care about subjects that won't feed her family. Envy that she'll never know what it feels like to be a child whose only job is to be a child.

The traffic light turned green. My vehicle moved. She became smaller in the rearview mirror until she was just a shape, then a memory, then a ghost that would haunt me during meals I didn't finish, during complaints about minor inconveniences, during moments when I forgot how much of life is just luck and geography.

I will never know her name. But I remember the old bantu knots on her head and the pattern of her gown.

EXHIBIT TWO: The Chicks

Three dead chicks, flattened by the truck ahead of us, their small bodies rendered two-dimensional by velocity. Yellow feathers mixed with red, with the dust of the road, with the inevitability of being small in a world designed for the large and fast.

Their mother,uhm …do you call a hen a mother? Yes, you do, because that's what she was, she circled them. Not frantic. Not loud. Just... circling. The way grief moves when it doesn't know what else to do. Round and round the bodies of what used to be hers, what used to be alive and chirping and following her like she was the entire universe.

I don't know if chickens understand death. I don't know if she was mourning or just confused, waiting for them to get up, to shake off the dust, to keep following. But I know what I saw looked like loss. Looked like that specific kind of helplessness that comes when you can't protect the ones you're supposed to protect.

And I thought about mothers everywhere. Human mothers. Mothers of children who don't come home. Mothers who circle the scenes of accidents, of violence, of preventable deaths, asking the same question that hen was asking, Mothers of Palestine and Dudan and Congo : Why them? Why now? Why couldn't I stop it? What is the essence of my life after this?

We drove past. Life continued. Somewhere behind us, that mother hen was still circling. Or maybe she'd stopped. Maybe she'd moved on, the way survival demands you move on, even when your entire world just got crushed under a tire.

EXHIBIT THREE: The Oil Seller

He sat outside his stall, an old man selling car oils and lubricants. His dark skin was creased like a map of a country that had seen too many wars, his hands stained black from years of handling products designed to keep engines running, to prevent friction, to make machines last longer than they were built to.

I looked at him and I time-traveled. I saw him at sixteen, maybe seventeen, full of something that looked like hope. I saw him dreaming, not small dreams either, but the kind that keep you awake, that make you believe you're destined for something larger than the small town you were born in.

When did the dreams start dying? Was it gradual, the way light fades at dusk, so slow you don't notice until you're standing in the dark? Or was it sudden, a specific moment when life said no so loudly he had no choice but to listen?

Maybe he wanted to be a mechanic, own his own shop, employ people, drive a car he'd fixed himself. Maybe he wanted to leave his town entirely, go to Lagos, become someone unrecognizable to the boy he used to be. Maybe he wanted to fall in love with a girl whose father said no, whose no became the first in a long line of nos that eventually built the walls of this small stall on this dusty road.

Or maybe…and this is the possibility that breaks me the most…maybe he's happy. Maybe he never had grand dreams. Maybe this stall, this corner, this daily rhythm of selling oils to strangers, is exactly what he wanted. Maybe I'm the one projecting my fears onto his face, assuming his life is small because it looks different from what I've been taught success should look like.

But I'll never know. He's a stranger. I'm a stranger. We exist in each other's periphery for three seconds before my vehicle moves on and he returns to being a man I'll remember but never meet.

EXHIBIT FOUR: The Newlyweds

A convoy of black Corollas passed us, "JUST MARRIED" printed in gold letters across the license plate, purple ribbons fluttering like promises in the wind. Inside, I could see them, the bride in white, the groom in a suit that probably cost more than some people earn in a year, both of them smiling that specific smile that comes from believing you've figured it out, that love is enough, that today's joy guarantees tomorrow's happiness.

And I traveled forward with them. I saw their first apartment, modest but theirs, full of mismatched furniture and the kind of hope that makes you believe you can build a kingdom from scratch. I saw their first argument, the one where they realize marriage is not the wedding, that love is not always the butterflies, that forever is made of a million small choices to stay even when leaving feels easier.

I saw her pregnant, swollen with the weight of a future they made together, him pacing outside the delivery room the way men do when they're trying to be useful but don't know how. I saw them at 3am with a crying baby, exhausted, arguing about whose turn it is, wondering if they made a mistake, if they were ready, if love is enough when you're running on two hours of sleep and your entire life smells like sour milk.

I saw them ten years later, sitting across from each other at dinner, not talking, scrolling through phones, the silence between them heavy with all the things they stopped saying because saying them felt like opening wounds that might not close.

Or maybe I saw them twenty years later, still laughing, still holding hands, their children grown and their love grown too, deeper and quieter and more resilient than the loud excitement of their wedding day. Maybe I saw them as proof that some loves survive, that some promises don't break, that some people really do get their happy ending.

Or maybe both. Maybe all of it. Maybe their marriage will be like everyone's marriage…beautiful and ugly and mundane and extraordinary, full of moments they'll want to remember and moments they'll spend years trying to forget.

I don't know. The convoy turned left. I kept going straight. Their future became speculation, the way everyone's future is speculation, the way we're all just driving forward hoping the road doesn't end too soon.

INTERMISSION: Nothing is ever that deep,but I don't know whether I'm normal if even the mere act of looking outside of a window is philosophical to me but believe me when I say,it sat with me and let me tell you what I learnt on that journey. Maybe some other day, we'll talk about the other things I've learnt on other journeys that I gazed outside of the window.

I think when they say ‘raw’,looking outside and gazing through people's lives is it. Books lie sometimes and also they give you neat resolutions, character arcs that make sense, suffering that serves a purpose and mostly,the author would have arranged it and smoothened it all out. But the window shows you life as it actually is: random, relentless, beautiful and brutal often in the same breath.

The window shows you that most lives don't have narrative structure. Most people aren't protagonists in stories that matter. Most suffering doesn't teach lessons. Most dreams don't come true. Most love doesn't last. Most deaths aren't poetic.

And yet.

And yet people keep living. The girl keeps selling oranges. The hen keeps laying eggs. The old man keeps opening his stall every morning. The newlyweds keep building their life, one small choice at a time.

EXHIBIT FIVE: The Woman Who Looked Back

At a traffic stop, I locked eyes with a beautiful woman in the car next to mine. Just for a second. She was crying, tears running down her face while she stared straight ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.

I wanted to ask her what was wrong. I wanted to tell her it would be okay, even though I had no way of knowing if it would be. I wanted to reach through the glass and the metal and the social convention that says we don't acknowledge other people's pain when it's inconvenient, and just... hold her. Tell her she's not alone. Tell her that crying in your car at a traffic light is one of the most human things you can do, that we've all been there, that breaking down is sometimes the only way to break through.

But the light turned green. She wiped her face. My car drove on. And I'll never know what made her cry, if she got home and felt better or worse, if that was the worst day of her life or just another Tuesday in a long line of hard Tuesdays.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM LOOKING OUT OF WINDOWS?

Life is not fair. This is not a revelation, everyone knows this. But knowing it intellectually and witnessing it viscerally are different things. The window makes you witness. It makes you see that some people start with everything and squander it, while others start with nothing and build kingdoms from dust. It makes you confront the randomness of who suffers and who doesn't, who gets lucky and who gets crushed.

Life is not neat. There are no chapter breaks, no commercial interruptions, no moments when the rhythm swells and you know everything is about to change. There's just the relentless forward motion of time, carrying everyone…the girl with oranges, the grieving hen, the old man, the newlyweds, the crying woman, me? Toward endings we can't predict or control.

Life is not always beautiful, but it's always vivid. Even in its ugliness, even in its unfairness, even in its brutality, there's something magnetic about it. Something that demands to be witnessed. Something that makes you look even when looking hurts.

I have looked out the window and seen:

A man pushing a cart full of scrap metal uphill, his entire body a study in exhaustion.

A child laughing so hard they fell off their bicycle, got up, and kept laughing.

A funeral procession, slow and solemn, everyone dressed in black, shouldering their grief like a collective burden.

A woman selling vegetables by the roadside, her baby strapped to her back, asleep in the chaos.

A billboard advertising luxury apartments I'll never afford,or rather “cannot afford yet” , positioned where people who will never afford them have to look at it every day.

I have looked out the window and understood:

That I am lucky in ways I don't deserve.

That luck is not a reward for virtue…it's just luck.

That most of the world is invisible until you decide to look.

That once you start looking, you can't stop.

I still bring my books when I travel. But I don't open them as often anymore. Because the window offers something fiction can't: the raw, unedited, uncomfortable truth of lives being lived in real time. No author shaping the narrative. No editor smoothing out the rough parts. Just people existing, struggling, surviving, dreaming, dying, loving, losing, continuing.

The girl with the oranges is still out there somewhere. Maybe she's sold them all by now. Maybe she's gone home to a family that depends on the money she made. Maybe she's hungry. Maybe she's dreaming of a life that doesn't require her to balance basins on her head while cars drive past pretending not to see her.

The old man is still at his stall. The newlyweds are building their life. The woman has stopped crying, or maybe she hasn't. The hen has either moved on or is still circling. I don't know. I'll never know.

And maybe that's the point. Not to know, but to witness. Not to fix, but to see. Not to turn away from the brutality and beauty of it all, but to let it change you, to let it make you more human, more awake, more alive to the fact that this…all of this…is happening all the time, whether you're looking or not.

So I look.

And I hold them with me, these strangers, these lives I'll never live, these moments I can't fix or change or make sense of.

They're just like proof that I was here, I saw, I didn't look away.

The window is still there. The road keeps moving. And somewhere, always, there's someone looking back.