PUPPETS AND PUPPETEERS

We were all hungry for something. Houses, Sex, food, love, wealth, cars, dreams; whatever it was, we all had castles in the air we wanted to see built.
 

 Everyone  yearned and I yearned as much as they did. My life was one long starvation for my yearning and though I yearned as much as everyone did, smoked as much as everyone smoked, drank as much as everyone drank, was happy as much as everyone faked, I knew somewhere in the back of my drugged mind that death stared at us benignly. We were juicy fat, depressed pigs garnished for the kill. We did not care. We just laughed more, smoked more, had sex more, wept more. We yearned for life so much we lived centuries in a few days. 

Every now and then, one of us would stray into normalcy and be buried in a heap of life responsibilities, but with responsibilities came reality, and reality stared at you in the face each minute and screamed, “Go fucking die!” So they drifted back to insanity and us, and whispered things like, “I was trying to get that law degree” or “I was trying to get that promotion” or “I wanted to get married and settle down, you know?” Then they smoked and drank some more till they felt nothing. Till they felt death who held us to her bosom like her favourite children. She loved us so much she made us live. If only for a few months more.

We were that bunch that dreamed in ways that could never be achieved, dependent on our families for support but living like millionaires. We fucked men, women, and everything else in between. You couldn’t understand us. No one could understand us, products of a materialistic age that defined you by what you were able to acquire. Slaves we were to acquisition so much that when we were set free, we did not know what to do. 

Hope. Hope was the delusion of the minds of those who could not believe the ridiculousness of their lives so they hoped. They hoped with their sterling degrees and various honours they would find jobs. They hoped that their bosses would increase their paychecks. They hoped that they would save enough to buy a house. They hoped that they would have a nice, happy family and go golfing on weekends. And they hoped those things would make them happy. Happiness was a product to be bought in the black market and they could get it if they worked hard enough. They hoped and hoped and hoped in a system that had grabbed Hope by the neck, fucked her silly and thrown her to wolves where she died a slow painful death. But they still hoped.

We were beatniks of sorts, a resurgence of Hippies, Ghanaian style living wild and free, not just because we were young but also because we were prisoners.

Some of us sought some form of redemption, any form of redemption from this damned life. So we stumbled on religion. We believed fervently in a God that would cleanse us of our sins. We had to believe that we were sinners condemned to live a life of damnation unless Jesus Christ swooped down to save our asses. And all Jesus Christ wanted us to do was call him our Lord and personal savior? We could do that! We could definitely do that. I mean, who could believe the truth that our lives were damned for no reason at all and still be sane? Who could believe the truth that there was no hidden cause for our wretched lives and still have their heads screwed on? So we believed fanatically, if you may, that we had to be sinners, for eating some forbidden fruit in some utopian garden. Whatever it was we ate, we had to have done something to anger God. And for some time this gave us relief.

But Reality was Reality, and pastors became liars, reverends became politicians, and the Bible became cause for war. 

So we smoked some more, drank some more, had sex some more. A couple of us left suicidal notes and they became poetry to the distressed ears of those who chose to keep on living. 

Yet in our damnation, we were free.

We were the young adults of 2014.