On burning and healing
It had been only days since the one-year anniversary of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and death — and so I ran across the street, aflame in my brown jalabiya, one of the many existential thoughts unraveling in my mind was if Aaron, in those minutes of searing, unimaginable heat, regretted setting himself on fire.
In the days and pain that followed what I’ve come to call my undoing; I tried to write down the thoughts that raced through my mind during the longest ten seconds of my life:
- Fuck, why is it so hot?
- Fuck, hellfire is serious business.
- Aaron Bushnell.
- I need water. Why is everyone shouting and not doing anything?
- There’s a well over there. I should jump in. I might die from the fall, but anything’s better than this pain.
- Fuck, the well’s locked.
- Yay, I put the fire out with my hands.
- Damn, boy so hot he caught fire.
That’s a lot of curse words. Sorry, I must have burned my filters.
At the hospital, the doctor peeled away layer after layer of skin until more than half my body was an open wound. The doctor, a dark-skinned man who entertained my half-assed jokes, instructed the intern nurses to take pictures. “These are dead tissues,” he explained. “We remove them so new ones can grow.” I don’t remember which friends were in the room when I joked that I’d finally become a specimen worth studying. I might have been alone. The three friends who drove me to the clinic had been asked to leave as the doctor scrubbed my raw flesh with iodine-soaked gauze.
The pain of the first scrub is indescribable. It was like bathing in those tradiotnal sponges, but without skin. My throat still tightens when I try to recall it. The doctor applied a silver cream, covered the wounds with gauze, and wrapped me in crepe bandages. As a final act of care, he gave me “something for the pain,” which didn’t lessen the pain but made me comfortable with it.
That night, in the monitoring unit, I held my right hand up to the light leaking through the blinds. It was no longer mine. It trembled uncontrollably, numb and foreign. This was the same hand that had gripped burning metal, the same hand that had smothered the flames, the same hand that, seconds after the fire was out, opened my car door and turned the ignition to drive away from the scene. I cradled it with my other hand to apologize for its suffering.
The human body, for all its glory, is impossibly fragile. It takes three minutes to sear a steak; my body came undone in less than ten seconds. My mind fared worse. I could speak, but thinking beyond the surface was a struggle. Emails went unanswered. Texts were misinterpreted.
Flicker today, flame tomorrow, as long as it does not die.
Tomorrow, I will change my life.
– February 25, 2025
That night, I called my mother and close friends, lying about the weakness in my voice. “Just a small fever,” I said. Conversations were hard to follow, partly because of the pain, but mostly because my brain refused to process anything.
Healing, I learned, is a slow, messy affair. Through the night, as sleep eluded me, my body sifted through the damage, deciding what to discard and what to keep. Fluids seeped into the bandages or formed a barrier between skin and muscle. My hand, burned nearly to the third degree, swelled and glistened in the light, the silhouette of bones dancing beneath the surface.
I was discharged on the third day, the first time I told anyone beyond G, A, and B, who had been there when it happened. My uncle, my father, an old friend I’d recently reconnected with—they all heard the news. That morning, as G and A talked in the bed across from me, I cried listening to Rybeena’s new album, Virtuoso, and days later to Jacob Banks’ book three of the Yonder. By then, I was practically immobile. Standing, sitting, turning—each movement was agony. My body reeked of dead, wet flesh and antibiotics. Pockets of golden, urine-looking, penicillin-smelling fluid swirled beneath my skin whenever I moved.
I cried for the pain, yes, but also for everything else.
Everything I feel makes me want to cry.
I’m a Yoruba boy and amafred Rybeena has done it again. If I was fine I’d probably write a little more. can’t even type well or much. argh
– March 6, 2025
When I was sixteen, a speeding truck hit me as I waited to cross the road to the farm where I worked. I woke up in a gas station with petrol in my mouth, a fractured shoulder, and four missing teeth. My earliest near-death experience, one I don’t remember, involved sticking my hand into a live socket as a crawling infant. At three, my uncles accidentally split my head open with a roofing pan—the scar still visible when I cut my hair low. A year later, something burned the front of my head, leaving a dark mark. At nine, I hid a leg injury until it became infected with tetanus.
In proletariat Nigeria, death is always tailing you. I’ve been shot at by highway robbers in Ogbomosho and customs officials at the Nigerian-Benin border. In 2023, when I laid out knives to confront robbers armed with shotguns and cutlasses, Junaid talked me out of it. As revenge, the robbers hacked at the double-layered sweaters we’d worn for protection.
How many near-death encounters are too many? When does it cross the line between living life and a lack of self-preservation?
With the wounds, standing takes eleven minutes—ten spent debating whether it was worth the effort, one spent clutching nearby furniture as blood rushed to my bandaged, skinless legs. I described the sensation to G as lava pouring into my blood vessels.
I’ve gained a new understanding of my fragility, a deeper appreciation for my people, and a quiet, slow-burning resilience.
btw, no better time to be a narcissist than when you’re mummified borderline senile bag of open flesh.
No network. God which kind life be this.
– March 10, 2025
Dermazin cream, tulle fabric, and crepe bandages became my artificial skin, ripped off and replaced every 48 hours at a cost of over 40,000 naira per session. Health is wealth—especially when you’re spending 140,000 naira a week on it. My finances stretched until they snapped, then stretched some more.
Nothing, absolutely nothing can explain this smell, not even smelling it, it seems. Nobody seems to smell it except me (or they do smell it but are too courteous to be honest with me). Sometimes I leave a room because it’s too there and then wherever I go it eventually gets there because of fucking course, I am the one who smells. The smell is coming from me.
– March 9, 2025
At the hospital, the nurses celebrated as my skinless flesh turned from pale white to bright pink, then to bleeding red. “This is the first sign of healing,” they said. Where the white refused to fade, they scrubbed with gauze and iodine until my brain, fuzzy with pain, stopped sending signals altogether. I learned the politics of Nigerian medical care: nurses are better wound dressers than doctors. Doctors are brutal, uncoordinated, and terrible at wrapping bandages. Nurses, at least, have a 50% chance of being kind, washing wounds gently and wrapping bandages with the care of a boxing coach preparing a fighter for their first spar.
Sometimes, though, I get the angry nurse, the one who holds sputum in her mouth as she works.
I’ve always defined freedom as independence, so I have to learn dependence. I can’t stand without help. I need assistance to pick up my charger or put on the wine-colored jalabiya I wear to the clinic. Yet, I’ve developed a compulsive habit of doing things despite the pain. I stood without help. I fried eggs. I tried to get out of the car when my friends were slow to respond. I nearly spilled hot stew on myself. G says I am being irritable.
G has been doing everything in the house these days, and I would literally have died without them. And in my usual fashion I try to do too much simply to prove that I can, that I’m not senile, that I’m not powerless. I try to warm the food, find something in the car, etc, these mundane tasks that are now six course obstacles.
G tells me, you can do them, but you don’t have to. You can be soft here. I tell her that I wish that was the case, but I do have to because I’ve had to do everything myself, because if I don’t do it myself it doesn’t get done. I feel compulsion to do it myself because if I am not sure it’s getting done.
Maybe I am my own problem.
– March 7, 2025
G and I invented a game called Therapy Questions, where we answer therapy-sounding questions with the honesty reserved for therapy sessions. When G asked for three words to describe how I felt, I replied with four: “Frustrated. Undone. Somewhat Grateful.”
My mother didn’t find out until six days later. She insisted I come live with her so she could care for me properly.
Most of my body responded slowly but surely to treatment. With each redressing, the flesh turned a deeper shade of pink. My brain, though, lagged behind. I feel myself struggling to reach parts of who I was. It’s better now, but the lack lingers. Thoughts evade me. Journaling is hard. Writing is harder.
I’ve spent too much time watching videos of my body before the great undoing—graceful in light and water, a version of myself I didn’t think could be lost. But I’m learning to love what remains. Healing is thin, fragile, and uneven. It is a patchwork of skin, scars, and tender pink flesh. I stare obsessively at the mirror, still learning to decipher whatever story this body is trying to tell.
Tomorrow will come. I’ll listen to Fatou in a bus riding the West Coast. I’ll finish that story. I’ll finish that project. I’ll shoot that film. I’ll perfect my French and live in that city and see its artists and bury my legs in its beaches.
This is not how it ends.
– March 3, 2025
