The Olodo People

The night was unusually bright, so I guessed it was most likely a full moon, and I had one thing on my mind. So I went out to the balcony, but I found her there, doing exactly what I wanted to do. Sitting in the beautiful moonlit darkness, a familiar tender tune playing from her phone's speaker, hands folded on the balcony railings and eyes turned to the moon in what looked like utter emptiness, but I knew her heart was full, so full it felt like prayer. Since prayer, as we are taught, is raising up our hearts and minds to the Father, then I guess she was doing something similar. To find someone in the same headspace as me, a place that I've never shared, even in words, for fear that my sanity might be called into question. To see someone unashamedly basking in its euphoria is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen and experienced. So I grabbed another chair inside and sat down a little bit behind her, put my legs on the railings and set my soul free for a few minu...

  This Living Death is the reason why you see so many unhappy married people over 40. They're shells of their former selves. Where light and warmth used to be, now there's only cold bitterness and anger. The places where mirth and joy used to abound aplenty have been laid to waste with heavy darkness and vast emptiness. They have little or no joy to give, so they look for happiness in all the wrong places. In money, alcohol, drugs, vices and hedonism. They love things and use people rather than the other way around. They've lost sight of who they are and all that they used to love. So now they walk around like deathly wraiths, spreading gloom and misery to all who they come in contact with; their homes are ground zero for the mini pandemic that is their existence. This phenomenon isn't exclusive to marriages; it happens in romantic relationships too. People lose and find themselves in love. Especially that first love, the overwhelming desire to keep that person makes us...

 One of the scariest things about the concept of marriage as a lifetime commitment is what I call 'The Living Death'.  This is basically losing a part of yourself due to certain circumstances. The living death isn't just exclusive to marriage. Over the course of our lives, there are certain parts of ourselves that die. Like a snake that sheds its skin, over time we lose habits and aspects of our personality, some more prominent than others. These changes define us and form our sense of self and personality over time. And like any death, the grief we feel over these losses differs based on how prominent these aspects of our personality were; sometimes we don't recognise these deaths until months and years later, and sometimes we never do. The thing with most of these deaths is that for most of them, it's unintentional; they happen because of indirect external influence or change in preferences. Take sagging, for example. For most kids, they sag during their teens thr...