" What are you doing in P...?!"
A message from Jay to me, October 2015.
"Cyrus please go, I can't walk away if you don't go..."
I couldn't move. I stood there for minutes thinking about what to do – I wanted to kiss and hold her but all she wanted to do was leave; she stomped her feet, looked down, looked at me and sighed – and said it again,
"You have to go Cyrus...turn around and go"
30 minutes later
"You're acting like a crazy person; you need to go now...go"
I turned around, and walked away, partly in disbelief, slightly embarrassed, mostly just fucking angry...at myself...for listening to that stupid voice in my head.
6 months earlier – A deus ex machina
Deus ex machina (pronounced day-oos eks makina; literally 'god from a machine') - an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.
I stood on the queue hoping - hoping that against many odds, I'd be able to get it. There were enough reasons for me to get it, but even more for me not to. I kept thinking about how I'd feel if I didn't get it and the many different ways I'd smile if I did get it. Remember it? from Chapter 1, when I mentioned that Jay was trying to get it and she eventually did - well now it was my turn to 'grapple' for it - but in reality, so far, I hadn't grappled at all, the opportunity to get it came almost entirely effortlessly. My Uncle, who is an Engineering professor in the US got invited to the White House for a ceremony that was put together to honour black people who had made distinguished contributions to Education at the college level - they called it the Champions of Change Ceremony.
The whole thing happened rather unexpectedly - one afternoon in 2015 I'm sitting in the living room, when my Dad walks in and delivers the news that his elder brother got invited to the White House for an award ceremony and he wants as many family members as possible to attend. What was funny was how nobody was particularly interested in going except me, they had this umm-yeah-okay-good-for-him look on their faces; I on the other hand became gung-ho about the whole thing - when I think about it, I think I was particularly eager to get the visa for two reasons - first it felt like I would be getting an escape option, something to fall-back on in case my startup dreams quickly went south and second, it was an opportunity to visit the US for the first time and of course, see Jay. So, in the next two weeks, I'd get to the passport office at Alausa to get a new passport - I'd spend days gathering documents for the online application not just for myself but for my Dad, Mom, Aunty and Uncle - on one particular day I'd be seated for hours filling the DS160 form, a hellishly long form.
As it happened, we were in a race against time to get embassy appointments, hopefully get visas, get plane tickets and fly to Washington D.C. for the ceremony - the visa appointments had to be expedited for us to have any chance of making it in time for the ceremony - without any expedition we would have to wait for at least a month to get appointments. We got the expedited appointments, not because the folks at the embassy wanted to give us, but because they had to - my uncle got the organisers at the White House to send special invitations on White House letter headed paper (this was so cool, I think I still look at it in my email maybe once every year) to the guys at the US embassy in Nigeria which would help facilitate the expedition. #PeopleWhoKnowPeople.
It all happened so fast - we got our appointments albeit on different days, my Dad, Mom and Aunt had theirs on the same day (a Tuesday), I had mine alone the next day, and my Uncle had his 2 days after. There was one problem though, the ceremony was slated for the evening of the Tuesday before my own appointment - which meant that even if we all got visas, we won't be able to attend, as there's typically a ten-day waiting period to pick up visa-stamped passports at some DHL office. Asides that, there was still the likelihood that they might deny our visas on the grounds that we won't be able to make the ceremony, or they'd just pick some other reason from the plethora of possible reasons.
