EYIMOFE-AT-LARGE

My latest visit to Estonia was marked by many things: slow walks in a Japanese park, picking fine stones on the beach, my sister’s plantain fufu and egusi soup, the random roadside book-exchange library…the list goes on. I have deliberately omitted the most significant one—saved the best for last, if you will—because it deserves the spotlight, funnily enough. You’ll see the joke in a second.

If you’re a pseudo-narcissist like me, you’d have self-diagnosed scopophobia, or, as it’s more commonly known, ‘the spotlight effect’. Scopophobia is an excessive fear of being stared at. My latest visit to Estonia was all ‘scopo’. I excused the children who eyeballed me with what I can only describe as infantile spasm—a certain curiosity popular at that age. But not the man in his mid-twenties whose eyes pierced mine on Estonia Avenue, or, ‘Estonia pst’ as it was written. I whispered the street name to Tolu and Marina beside me. The whisper was the punchline. 

The mid-twenties man and I entered into a five-second staring contest. He lost. ‘Estonia pst, Estonia pst’, I returned to a familiar joke until...fade to black.