Non-Fiction by drc. Jaèy

[Date: Tuesday. The power is out again.]

The needle doesn’t just drop; it drags. It scrapes across the vinyl of my memory like a fingernail across a chalkboard. Brymo’s Entropy isn’t a song you simply listen to; it’s an environment you inhabit—a dense, humid atmosphere where the oxygen is slowly being replaced by the scent of old wood and dying fires.

If you haven’t heard it, you must understand that Brymo sings like a man who has seen the end of the world and decided to sing about it. The song is built on a skeletal arrangement: percussion that feels like a heartbeat skipping, and strings that weep without being sentimental. It is the sound of structural integrity failing.

I’m sitting here in the dark—the kind of Lagos dark that feels like wet velvet against your skin and I’m realising that I’ve spent the last six months trying to solve you like a math problem.

I remember the first time I heard this song. It was three years ago. We were in a yellow-and-black taxi, the kind that smells of diesel and collective anxiety. We were stuck in that legendary Lagos sludge, the traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge stretching out like a dying snake. The driver’s radio was a crackling mess of static until Brymo’s voice cut through—that voice that sounds like it’s been dragged over fine gravel and soaked in palm wine—and began to wail: And you’re always buzzing like neon… —jagged and soulful.

At the time, I was sitting next to you. Our fingers were interlaced so tightly I couldn’t tell where my sweat ended and yours began. You were leaning your head against the window, the vibration of the bus rattling your braids. I watched the way the orange streetlights flickered across your face.

I remember thinking the song was beautiful but cynical. I didn’t know then that Brymo wasn’t being a pessimist; he was being a physicist. Now, I sit on my balcony in the dark, watching the yellow glow of the streetlights struggle against a power outage, finally understanding that love is not a destination. It is a closed system. And in a closed system, the only way is down.

[Date: Three years ago? Maybe four. The micro-frictions began.]

To understand the entropy of us, I have to talk about the beginning. In the beginning, we were a low-entropy system. Everything was in its place. I keep returning to that Tuesday night—or perhaps it was a morning, the distinction lost in the haze of new love. You were in the kitchen of that cramped apartment in Yaba, the one where the walls always felt slightly damp from the humidity. You were frying plantains, laughing because you’d sliced them too thin and they were curling into themselves like burnt parchment. The oil popped, sending out tiny, violent bursts of heat. You were wearing my blue linen shirt, the one with the ink stain on the pocket, and you’d tied your hair up with a piece of twine. I leaned against the doorframe, watching the steam rise.

There was this profound sense of rightness. There was no ‘noise’ in the room; just the sound of the frying and your humming. This was our low-entropy state. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. I could predict the curve of your smile before it happened. I knew the exact frequency of your laugh. It was a time of high information and low noise. We were a crystal structure, perfect and cold-formed, yet vibrating with a heat that felt like it would never dissipate. I touched the small of your back, and you leaned into me—a perfect transfer of kinetic energy. In that moment, the universe felt solvable.

The decay wasn’t a bang. It wasn’t even a whimper. It was a series of micro-frictions.

In physics, entropy is the measure of disorder. In love, it is the measure of the unsaid. It started with the way ‘How was your day?’ transformed from a genuine inquiry into a mechanical obligation. The information—the ‘order’ of our communication—was being replaced by noise. I’d come home and find you staring at the skyline from our balcony, and the energy required to bridge the two feet of space between us felt like trying to cross the Atlantic.

I started treating my life like a laboratory. I am no longer a man who was left; I am a Principal Investigator studying the aftermath of a high-energy collision. I categorise the debris to keep it from cutting me. Your toothbrush, still sitting in the ceramic cup, is a monument to inertia. It stays at rest because I lack the external force to throw it away.

There is a specific kind of wit you develop in Lagos. It’s a survival mechanism. I think of the time our car stalled on the bridge at midnight. The Atlantic was a black void beneath us, smelling of salt spray and old oil. We sat there, surrounded by the smell of burnt rubber and the distant, mocking glow of the city lights, and you started laughing.

Nkem, you said, “even the car is tired of us.” It was a high, thin sound that cut through the noise of the passing cars.

I hated that laugh. It was the laugh of someone who had already accepted the entropy. I was still out there in the dark, poking at the battery terminals, trying to force a spark out of a dead system. I was the man; I was supposed to fix the alternator, to move the mountains, to keep the wheels turning. I wanted to weld the pieces back together. But you saw the poetry in the breakdown. You saw the entropy before I did.

You understood that the ‘perpetual unfolding’ sometimes looks like a stalled Honda in the middle of a lagoon. Brymo’s voice carries this grit, a texture that reminds me of that night. He sings as if he’s trying to hold water in a sieve. When he talks about the chaos in the beautiful, I see your face in that rearview mirror —chaotic, flickering, and utterly indifferent to the fact that we were stranded.

The fade-out is long. It’s the most honest part of the track—that long, slow instrumental finish where the strings sound like they’re being pulled apart. As the volume drops, I realise that music, like us, is just a temporary arrangement of energy: a brief defiance of the silence that eventually reclaims everything.

There is a cruelty in the laws that govern us, a friction between what stays and what spreads. The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy is never truly lost; it just changes form. It’s the reason a cup of coffee doesn’t just vanish when it goes cold—the heat hasn’t died, it has just moved into the air around it.

But the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the one that breaks your heart. It says that once that heat spreads out, you can never get it back. Order always turns into chaos.

This is the physics of our aftermath. All that concentrated heat we generated—the kinetic energy of our bodies when we make love, the heat of our arguments when we fight—is still technically ‘here’ in the universe. It has simply obeyed the laws of physics and leaked out into the Lagos night, warming the pavement or fueling the restless, flickering hum of a neon sign. Our love hasn’t disappeared; it has just become too scattered to ever be gathered back into a flame. It is everywhere, and therefore, it is nowhere.

I see you in my Instagram feed sometimes. A photo of you at a gallery in Victoria Island. You look… happy. Expanded. Or maybe you just look like someone who has successfully transitioned into a new state of matter—something gaseous and free, that has finally escaped its container and realised how much space there is in the world. While I remain solid and heavy. Still sitting in the container, measuring the pressure of your absence.

[Date: Tonight. The ‘Tiger’ generator next door is screaming.]

Love doesn’t usually end with a bang. It ends with thermal equilibrium. It ends when the temperature of the relationship matches the temperature of the outside world. Cold. Indifferent. The generator next door just ran out of fuel. The silence that follows is terrifying, but it’s also the only place where I can finally hear myself breathe.

Tampered Press asks in the prompt of this writing if we can be ‘at ease within that continuum of memory’. I am trying. I am moving with time, as I must. I am reflecting on the order of the past and anticipating the total randomness of the future. I return to the suya spot under the bridge at Falomo, not to find you, but to witness the decay. I look at the places where we carved our names at Bar Beach and see how the salt air has already eaten the letters. I am at ease with the memory only because the memory is the only thing that hasn’t dissipated yet. But I know, as Brymo knows, that even memories have a half-life. Eventually, even the ghost of you will reach equilibrium with the shadows on this balcony.

The power hasn’t come back on yet, but my eyes have adjusted to the dark. I can hear the final notes of the track and realise that the ‘return’ isn’t a destination. It’s the ability to hear a song about your own destruction and find the melody beautiful. The entropy continues. And for once, the chaos is enough.

Bio
drc. Jaèy is a polymath and multidisciplinary creative navigating the literal and metaphorical roads of West Africa. Based in Accra, his work as an audio producer and foley artist captures the everyday frequencies of African life. He is currently producing GLIMPSE (Ghanaian Life In Many Personal Short Episodes), a 10-part binaural audio drama series exploring contemporary Ghanaian life—an initiative of Cane Sugar Studios and AMBC. Alongside his audio production, he is finalising his first literary reader—a collection of journals, poems, and essays. Jaèy is the founder of AMBC (African Masters Broadcasting Centre), through which he has collaborated with global platforms including the BBC and Fashion Times.