The Long Road to Abia – 5
An Anthropological Inquiry into Infrastructure, Ego, and The Industrialization of Grief in Igboland
“We have plastered over the silence of our dead with a deafening gallery of gloss, and in the quiet that follows the peeling of the vinyl, we are left with only the echo of our own avoidance.”
Today is the 31st of December, 2025, and the date arrives already carrying a weight that does not belong to it alone but has been collectively agreed upon and rehearsed over years of repetition. It is the last day of the year, a day that culture has trained us to approach as a boundary, a hinge, a ceremonial full stop placed carefully at the end of a sentence that may not, in truth, be finished. It is meant to gather everything before it, compress it, summarize it, and offer the illusion of closure. This date expects reflection, resolution, reconciliation, and a certain quiet dignity, as though time itself has…
What follows emerges from that tension. These are notes and diary records drawn from the past eleven days, written without the benefit of distance or hindsight. They were composed in fragments, returned to again and again, not because they had reached completion, but because they resisted it. Each return revealed that something had been missed, something unsaid, something felt too quickly or not fully enough. They carry the texture of interruption. They were written between events, after events, sometimes during them, often when the body was already depleted but the mind refused to disengage. They include observations made in passing, comments overheard without invitation, conversations entered reluctantly and exited without ceremony, reflections that surfaced only after exhaustion had stripped away any remaining impulse to perform coherence. These entries do not aspire to neatness. They do not seek polish. They aim instead for honesty under pressure, the kind of honesty that appears when one no longer has the energy to curate an acceptable version of feeling. This is the writing that occurs when sleep is delayed, when the body is overstimulated, when the soul is crowded but still searching, stubbornly, for somewhere quiet to rest.
This stretch of days was meant to be a holiday. It was meant to be a pause, a soft interval carved out of routine, marked by rest, familiarity, and the reassurance of return. The expectation was ease. The promise was restoration. Instead, it unfolded as an endurance exercise, a sustained test of presence and politeness, a marathon of social obligation that left little room for withdrawal. One day folded into the next without ceremony, each demanding attendance, acknowledgment, participation. Time did not slow as promised. It thickened. It became viscous, heavy, resistant to the usual measurements. Hours dragged while days disappeared. The body continued to move from place to place, event to event, but the mind lagged behind, trying constantly to catch up with what it was being asked to absorb. The rituals arrived in rapid succession, loud and insistent: wakes, weddings, dedications, unveilings, and then further unveilings layered upon unveilings. Each demanded a different posture, a different emotional register, a different uniform of dress and expression. Each insisted on relevance. Each claimed significance.
I write from inside that exhaustion, not after it. These notes were not produced in the calm of retrospection but in conditions of overload. There was too much sound, too many bodies, too many repetitions of the same gestures performed with increasingly fragile conviction. Noise seemed to travel farther than it should have, spilling into spaces that once promised quiet. Smells lingered in the air long after their source had disappeared, clinging to clothes, to rooms, to memory. Even silence, when it appeared, felt temporary and borrowed, like a room occupied on loan, always at risk of being reclaimed by the next announcement or arrival. The air itself felt charged, saturated with expectation, as though every molecule was poised for the next performance, the next speech, the next reveal. Rest was postponed repeatedly, not by force, but by momentum.
These records are shaped by proximity. I was not observing from a distance, not standing apart with the safety of detachment. I was immersed, implicated, woven into the fabric of what was unfolding. Participation was not optional. Even withdrawal required explanation. The boundary between witness and subject collapsed early, leaving no clean separation between what was seen and what was felt. Each observation carried emotional weight. Each feeling altered perception. This entanglement remains unresolved in the writing because it was unresolved in experience. I did not arrive with the intention to document. I arrived to belong. Yet belonging revealed itself as complicated, heavy, and sometimes costly. It was not always comforting. It was not always generous. At times it felt like a mirror held too close to the face, revealing details one might prefer to blur or ignore.
There were moments of warmth, undeniably. Moments of genuine familiarity, flashes of connection that cut through the fatigue. But they rarely arrived alone. They came tangled in obligation, braided tightly with performance. Conversations drifted between sincerity and script, between what was truly meant and what was socially required. Laughter surfaced, sometimes freely and unexpectedly, sometimes precisely on cue. The body learned how to smile automatically while the mind quietly catalogued its own resistance. I found myself nodding along to stories I had heard many times before, applauding speeches that sounded like faint variations of last year’s speeches, embracing people whose names had escaped me but whose expectations pressed clearly and heavily against my chest. Recognition did not always require memory. Presence did not always require engagement.
The pressure of it all was not dramatic. No single event overwhelmed me. There was no singular breaking point. Instead, the strain accumulated slowly, almost politely. Meaning did not collapse; it eroded. It wore down gradually under the weight of repetition and excess. What should have felt significant became oddly light, stripped of gravity by overexposure. Meanwhile, minor details began to swell with importance. A gesture lingered longer than a ceremony. A smell carried more weight than a speech. A pause, unplanned and awkward, felt more truthful than a rehearsed declaration. A child’s offhand remark about how many billboards accompanied a funeral embedded itself in memory more firmly than the funeral itself. A moment of silence shattered by a ringtone felt more honest than the eulogy that followed it. These imbalances demanded attention. They suggested that something had shifted, that something sacred was being handled differently now, repackaged, amplified, circulated, and in the process slowly emptied of its original density.
What you encounter here is an attempt, necessarily imperfect, to retrieve meaning from that imbalance. Not to impose order where none naturally exists, but to trace confusion faithfully, to sit with it long enough to understand its shape. Writing functions here less as explanation than as containment. It becomes a vessel, a way of holding what might otherwise spill over into restlessness or quiet resentment. These pages do not seek to accuse, nor do they offer absolution. They do not render judgment on individuals or communities. They record strain: personal strain, communal strain, atmospheric strain. They capture a mind attempting to remain attentive while being pulled in multiple directions at once, many of them contradictory.
If coherence emerges anywhere, it does so slowly and indirectly, in the tension between expectation and experience. The holiday promised ease, but delivered exposure. What appeared insignificant revealed itself as heavy. What claimed significance often arrived disguised as routine. The rituals were not empty, but they were crowded, dense with ego, spectacle, and the machinery of grief that now hums steadily, fueled by diesel generators, vinyl banners, drone footage, and the unspoken competition of visibility. Grief did not disappear. It was industrialized, scaled up, given infrastructure.
These notes are offered without resolution. They remain unfinished because the experience that produced them remains unfinished. They are burdened because the days that shaped them were burdened. They stay close to the bone because distance has not yet been earned. They are not conclusions. They are openings. They are written at the threshold of a year’s end by someone still inside the question, still surrounded by noise, still attempting to understand what was seen, smelled, endured, and felt. Whether understanding itself is the correct ambition remains uncertain. If there is a truth present here, it is not clean or singular. It is carnival-shaped, bright and grotesque, excessive and disorienting, spinning too quickly to be grasped comfortably, demanding attention even as it resists containment.
