A Story Not Lived, Yet Understood
Although Ose had just come from the village, he observed everything around him while walking with his uncle, Onosa.
“The guy with 366 scopes” was heard from a man of his uncle's age bracket, who was in a kiosk position at the entrance of the street as they passed by, and his uncle signified with a thumbs up and loud laughter.
“No be lie” he replied.
“Is this your brother?
A middle-aged woman asked who had met them on the road.
“Make sure you give him all your scopes”
The woman concluded with a smirk directed towards Ose.
Ose did not know why they called his uncle, the guy with 366 scopes but reckoned to know why during this visit with him in Omonoba, the most sophisticated area of their settlement.
Onosa lived in a storey building stopped at the decking level.
At one point, he loved sleeping, looking at the sky, and wishing on the stars before sleeping every night.
Picking up the flat mattress and going upstairs was a thing during the night without an electricity supply.
Above the building lies a flat concrete slab, rough and grey stretching like a ceiling that was meant to become a floor. The top of the building has no walls, no windows, no roof, and just open sky resting directly on the slab.
So these days, chatting and sharing ideas is common before going to sleep.
On this particular night, he sat with his uncle and they talked about getting along with people.
“They used to say that when you are getting along with people, there are types you should know,” Onosa said, looking at the sky.
Ose didn’t understand it. Types sounded like labels, and labels sounded like laziness from his perspective.
“How can he learn about types when there are approximately eight billion people in the world with distinct ways and features which made them complex” he ruminated.
Opposite the building is another which faces it.
It is not close enough to intrude and not far enough to ignore.
There was one particular window with pale curtains that never fully closed.
“Let us use those people as observation”
Onosa nodded as he headed in that direction.
There were two people visible. A man and a woman.
We never heard their names, although we needn't.
“ Names belong to conversations”
Ose said.
“ We only needed patterns,” Onosa replied after sipping a steaming cup of coffee.
Looking there at first, they were easy to read.
The man was the Performer as we could tell by how he moved, always a little exaggerated, like someone who knew he might be watched. His smiles lingered too long. His gestures were slightly too big. Even from across the street, you could see that he wanted to be understood without saying much.
The woman was quieter, somewhat called inward. She listened more than she spoke and when he talked, she watched him as if she was measuring something invisible.
“That is an overthinker, the kind that carries conversations long after they’ve ended”
Onosa said after several observations and nodding.
“They fit. Neatly” Ose replied before he dozed off.
That is how Ose added observing the couple to his daily routine check. You know that it states that an ideal man is a devil's workshop.
In the mornings after Onosa left for work, Ose will go to the spot to look at the couple which moved in rhythm with Coffee cups, shared space, and small laughter.
So in the evenings, Ose observed the rhythm change. The man would talk while the woman would nod. He would pace and she would sit. It wasn't an imbalance, not yet. Just a difference.
Ose thought he understood them and smiled.
“The couples are easy to read,” he told Onosa who looked indifferent, showing that he knew something that Ose did not know.
“Don't worry brother, humans are complex,” he replied.
That night, Ose started noticing what didn’t fit.
The man stood by the window alone with no movement, no performance. He just stood in stillness which lasted longer than anything he had seen from him before. His shoulders dropped, not dramatically for effect but quietly like something heavy had finally found its place.
The Performer he knew him to be was gone,
replaced with something else which was the Silent Sufferer.
It surprised Ose not because the man changed, but because it had always been there. Hidden beneath the gestures and behind the laughter. Ose had been watching him, but he had not seen him.
That was the first time Ose understood that people don’t belong to one type.
The woman changed too, but slower.
Harder to notice although her silence grew sharper and less patient. She still listened but now it felt like distance and not depth.
One evening, the man reached for her hand and she pulled away but not abruptly and not angrily, this action was just enough.
A small movement, but it said everything.
That was when Ose saw it.
She wasn’t just the Overthinker anymore,
She had become detached and not cold, not cruel but her attention is somewhere else.
And the man felt it. Ose could see it in how his movements changed and how the performer in him tried harder with more smiles and louder laughter with bigger gestures inclusively.
His effort couldn't fix what silence has already broken.
As days passed, then weeks followed.
The couples were still together but no longer with each other.
It’s a strange thing to witness a relationship end without a single visible argument. They stood at a distance without shouting and without slamming doors to be reactive. Their distance just keeps growing quietly, like a shadow stretching at sunset.
Ose began to understand something else then that the most important changes are rarely loud.
One night, everything shifted.
The man was speaking again, fast, animated, and almost desperate.
The kind of talking that tries to outrun something.
While the woman stood still with her arms folded, her face unreadable.
Then the man stopped and just like that.
No conclusion and no final word, he looked at her, waiting as she didn’t respond. Not immediately.
When she did, it was brief. A few words, with no movement although Ose couldn’t hear them, but he didn't need to.
The man stepped back and that was it,
With no drama and no collapse, just like a quiet ending.
The next morning, Ose quickly ran upstairs and saw that the window was open with only one cup on the table and the man remained but the woman was nowhere to be seen.
At first, nothing seemed different as the man moved the same way, kept the same routines and the performer returned which looked almost perfect.
But Ose knew better now.
Because sometimes, late at night, the man would stop and stand still when the silence would speak again.
Ose realized that he had been wrong about something important.
“They used to say there are types of people, but that isn’t the truth.
The truth is that there are moments that reveal different parts of the same person.
No one is just one thing;
Not the Performer.
Not the Overthinker.
Not the Detached.
Not even the one who watches from a distance, thinking they understand it all.
Because even the observers have their own mistakes” Onosa stated when he noticed that Ose broke down due to the couple's separation.
Ose thought he understood them, but he never knew why the woman left.
He never knew what the man said and never knew what they felt when no one was watching, not even him.
He had seen patterns and had read movements but he had not lived their life.
Ose concluded that maybe the closest stranger is far from the truth as he
stood outside the story to see it clearly,
feel it deeply and still do not fully understand it.
“That is one of the 366 scopes you have to learn about,” Onosa said one night, which serves as a resolution to the couple's story.
