PRESSURE (A Real Life Story).

Removed Excerpt From My Second Book, AFROLEON

Dr. Adeboye Oluwajuyitan⚡The Befibrillator

3 min readOct 9, 2024

Quick Q (Quote/Question):

Why can’t we close our minds tonight and open our hearts in the morning?
Why can’t we stumble freely into an open space and stabilize ourselves with our vulnerability?
Why can’t we drop our hoodies on our shoulders and worry only about the uniform air that we breathe?
Let’s all take the next swipe with our middle finger and displace the cardinal system from being the warden for our NEWS!
– Adeboye Oluwajuyitan, M.D., from Book, EvolutionR (Poem — In Motion)

VIBRANT CLOUDS! — WALL TO WALL DANCE COVER CHRIS BROWN | Youtube © BEFIBRILLATOR

PRESSURE

Excerpt— Date of Composition: September 2020

‘VULNERABLE’ Artwork © **BEFIBRILLATOR**

‘Pressure’ is when you are in an unfamiliar subway station a long way from your residence and are the only black fellow amongst a hundred to two hundred Caucasians. A minute ago, you had to descend down the escalator with all the eyes staring at you from right, left, and downwards, so many duchenne and pyramidal (genuine and fake) smiles beaming at you from several directions.

KHARKIV MAIN TRAIN STATION (VOKZAL) UKRAINE | PHOTO BY AUTHOR | 2012

Even though you make it through to the ground floor of the metro platform with your composure still intact, you know this is not over yet. Now, you must be stationary in one spot while waiting for the train. Suddenly, you again come to the realization that every one of the two hundred or so people around you has a pair of eyeballs.

Okay, you get the point — every human being has two eyeballs! But no, that is not enough; they want you to remember… they want this information to get consolidated within your neural networks as slowly as possible — WE HAVE EYEBALLS AND WE USE THEM FOR STARING!

Just when your false perception of pressure appears to reach the peak of its highest attainable action potential, a young caucasian boy walks up to you and asks, with his right index finger pointing to your forehead and his mother watching the show from a distance, ‘А почему ты так черный’ (‘a pachemu tih tak chornih?’ — ‘Why are you so black?’).

How do you react? What do you say? What happens next determines the genre of the movie. Will it remain poignant? Will it become a tragedy? Now, THIS IS THE REAL PRESSURE.

You have taken in the whole moment and scene with your last inhaled breath… Now, you have to exhale and now you have to produce the reaction.

You are the atomic element of the story; you embody the past, the present, and the future of this moment.

Exhaling, you contrive the best pyramidal smile that you can muster, reality dawning upon you that this is just a movie. You say to the boy, ‘мальчик, это солнце’ (‘malchik, eto solntse’ — ‘boy, it’s the sun!’.