A Different Kind of Curiosity

By the time I entered secondary school, the things I wanted to learn had started multiplying.

There was always something new catching my attention.

If it wasn’t a broken appliance, it was a drawing. If it wasn’t a drawing, it was music. If it wasn’t music, I was thinking about how something had been made. I could spend an entire afternoon watching someone repair a speaker and then go home and try to draw the shape of the speaker from memory.

My notebooks were proof of the confusion in my head.

The first few pages usually belonged to schoolwork. Mathematics, English, Biology, whatever subject we had been taught that week. Somewhere around the middle, things began to change. A teacher might find a page filled with calculations and turn three pages later to discover a badly drawn car, a house, a pair of shoes, or some strange machine with arrows pointing in every direction.

I never planned it.

My hand simply wandered.

One afternoon, I was sitting outside the classroom during break when I noticed a classmate drawing in the corner of her notebook.

She had drawn a face.

It wasn’t particularly large, but the details caught my attention. The eyes looked almost real. She had somehow managed to make the hair look like hair instead of a collection of black lines.

I leaned over.

“Who taught you how to draw like that?”

She looked at me.

“Nobody.”

“You just know how?”

She shrugged.

I took out my own notebook.

“Show me.”

She laughed.

“Show you what?”

“How you did the eyes.”

“You want to learn?”

I nodded.

She moved closer and took my pencil.

“First, don’t press too hard.”

She drew a circle.

“Then you add this.”

I watched carefully.

The drawing looked simple when she did it.

When I tried, mine looked like a football that had been stepped on.

She burst out laughing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Look at it.”

“It’s an eye.”

“That’s an eye?”

I looked at my drawing again.

“It is.”

She laughed harder.

I tried again.

The second one was slightly better.

The third was better than the second.

By the time the bell rang, I had filled half a page with terrible eyes.

I kept practicing anyway.

That was how art found its way into my life.

There was no grand moment.

No sudden realization.

I simply discovered that I enjoyed making things with a pencil as much as I enjoyed making them with cardboard.

Soon I was drawing whenever I had the chance.

Faces.

Buildings.

Cars.

Clothes.

Machines.

Sometimes I drew people I knew. Sometimes I drew people I had never seen. I would notice someone walking past the school gate and spend the next twenty minutes trying to remember the shape of their face.

My drawings weren’t good enough to impress anyone.

That didn’t bother me.

I liked watching the page change.

A blank sheet could become anything.

That idea fascinated me.

Music came later.

I had always listened to music, of course. Everybody did. Songs were everywhere. They came from radios, neighbours’ houses, shops, passing cars and churches on Sunday mornings.

But there was a difference between listening to music and wondering how it was made.

I began noticing things.

The drums.

The bass.

The voice behind the voice.

The sounds that appeared for only a few seconds.

I wanted to know where they came from.

One day, a friend told me about a computer program he had seen someone use to make music.

“A computer can make songs?”

“You can make the beat.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

That answer irritated me.

I wanted to know.

For the next few weeks, I kept asking questions until someone eventually showed me a music production program.

I remember staring at the screen for a long time.

There were buttons everywhere.

Tracks.

Samples.

Knobs.

Bars.

Numbers.

Things I didn’t understand.

It looked complicated.

I loved it immediately.

The first beat I made was terrible.

There is no kinder way to describe it.

The drums were off.

The sounds didn’t match.

The melody was strange.

When I played it back, even I knew something was wrong.

My friend laughed.

“Delete it.”

“No.”

“It sounds bad.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you keeping it?”

“Because I made it.”

He shook his head.

I saved the project.

I kept it.

I still remember the name I gave it. It was something embarrassingly simple, the kind of name a young boy gives his first creation because he has no idea that one day he might look back at it and laugh.

I did laugh eventually.

But I also kept learning.

Every new interest seemed to lead somewhere else.

Art taught me patience.

Music taught me rhythm.

Building things taught me to experiment.

School taught me that sometimes there were answers I could find in books.

And people taught me that curiosity could be embarrassing.

There were classmates who thought I was strange.

“Why are you always doing something?”

“Why don’t you just play football?”

“What’s that thing you’re drawing?”

“Are you trying to become an engineer?”

Sometimes I had answers.

And sometimes I didn’t.

I wasn’t always confident enough to explain myself.

There were days when I wondered if everyone else had figured something out that I hadn’t.

They seemed to know what they liked.

Some wanted to become doctors.

Some wanted to become lawyers.

Some wanted to join the military.

Some wanted to play football.

I had a list that changed every week.

Then, somewhere in the middle of all that confusion, something else happened.

I noticed a girl.

Her name was one I would eventually remember for years.

At first, I didn’t think much of it.

She was simply another student in the school. We crossed paths in the corridor, sat through the same assemblies and occasionally ended up in the same group during class activities.

Then one day, I caught myself looking for her.

I didn’t know when it started.

There was no particular moment I could point to.

Perhaps, it was the way she smiled when she was talking to her friends. Maybe it was the way she carried herself. Maybe it was something much simpler that my younger mind had turned into something important.

Whatever it was, I started noticing her everywhere.

If she entered the classroom, I noticed.

If she walked past the window, I noticed.

If someone mentioned her name, I listened.

I told nobody.

At least, I tried not to.

My friends noticed anyway.

One afternoon, Tunde looked at me while we were walking home.

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m always quiet.”

“No. This is different.”

I kept walking.

He watched me for a few seconds.

“Is it that girl?”

I stopped.

“What girl?”

He laughed.

“Exactly.”

“There is no girl.”

“There is definitely a girl.”

I continued walking.

He followed me, laughing.

“Prince!”

I ignored him.

“Prince!”

“What?”

“You like her.”

I kicked a small stone on the road.

“Shut up.”

That only made him laugh harder.

I didn’t tell him the truth.

I wasn’t ready to say it aloud.

Because once you say something like that, it becomes real.

So I kept it to myself.

Days turned into weeks.

Weeks became months.

And somehow, the feeling stayed.

I didn’t know much about love.

I only knew that whenever I saw her, something inside me became unusually aware of itself.

I became conscious of my clothes.

My hair.

The way I spoke.

Whether I looked stupid.

Whether she had noticed me.

It was ridiculous.

I knew it was ridiculous.

Still, I couldn’t stop.

One afternoon, I was sitting at home trying to finish a drawing when my mind wandered.

I had been sketching a machine.

Instead, without realizing it, I drew her face.

I stared at the page.

Then I quickly closed the notebook.

My heart was beating faster than it should have.

I opened it again.

The drawing wasn’t very good.

I smiled anyway.

For the first time, I understood that there were things I could build with my hands and things I couldn’t control at all.

I could rebuild a toy.

I could fix a wire.

I could draw a face until I was satisfied with it.

Feelings were different.

They didn’t listen.

They didn’t follow instructions.

They simply arrived and made themselves comfortable.

I had no idea then that this particular feeling would stay with me for years.

I also had no idea how it would end.

At that age, I still believed that if you cared about something for long enough, eventually it would become yours.

I was about to learn otherwise.