The Sound of Silence

Joy got home safely and was reassured by Favour’s absence. She had enough time to stage-manage her next point of action before he returned. She ran the tap and filled the tub to the brim, emptying all the shower gels and bath foams she could lay her hands on. She immersed herself into the water and allowed herself to be caressed by its energizing and soothing aromatherapy. Her life in the past one year came vividly alive in front of her as if she was watching a home video. She saw a young and vibrant girl full of dreams and aspiration for a better life for herself and her family. She saw how those dreams became ignited by the prognoses of a trip to Italy and allowed herself to re-live all the strong emotions she had felt when she took the first transport to Benin City, then the exciting trip to Lagos and the once in a life time experience of cruising a flight from Lagos to Niamey, in Niger. Her life stage show became surpassed by an otherwise extremely unforeseen circumstances of her transit saga, climaxed by her unbelievable arrival in the island of Lampedusa, after coming too close for comfort to death and losing a journey companion and close acquaintance to the deep and mysterious waters of the Mediterranean. Then her shattering affairs with life in the sex industry ran through her mind like a playback with so much speed and loft. She could not reconcile this dramatic movie with herself. What she saw was not a true reflection of her dreams and expectations. “Where did it all go wrong?” she questioned. Reality began to dawn on her as the water in the tub gradually became cold, reminding her that she it was almost winter, that she was in Europe and that the story in the movie she had just watched as a spectator, was, in fact her own story. It was reckoning time. She estimated how many years she would have to work in order to extinguish her outstanding debt of 80,000 Euros, besides her calculated costs of living. She carefully thought about how many men she would have to sleep with, and how old she would be by the time she would be free to work for herself and make her own money. She began to grasp the whole madness behind this whole arrangement and wondered why she did not stop to think about it until now. She broke into a liberating cry and started scrubbing herself hysterically as if she could wash away all that she had been through and become a new person with a brand new story to tell. She emerged from the bathtub a different person from the one who was submerged. She found her way to the under-utilized kitchen, made of sandwich and opened a dormant bottle of Lambrusco wine. It was time to celebrate the beginning of a long battle to come.