(Sochima’s Epiphany)
When your home is built near a highway, you witness all the different ways people try to escape this brutal, smattering thing called living. In an explosion. Plunged into a car. Over the overpass. Once, on your ninth birthday, a dog—large, feral, lion-like—stood in the middle of the road as though it, too, had grown weary of the life it was handed. Foam clung to its jaws, its tongue curling like flame around its teeth. It didn’t flinch. Didn’t pace. Just stood there, eyes shut, as a speeding Range Rover brought it peace.
You’ve never been able to unsee the things that unfolded on that highway, visible from the grand, useless balcony of your father’s house. That balcony was, in many ways, the only perk of living there. The house itself was large—spacious yet suffocating. Filled with things you never truly enjoyed. PlayStations. Xboxes. A cinema. And it was quiet. Except for the moments your parents’ voices rose like sirens above the ringing in your head.
Sometimes, when things got so unbelievably bad between them, you’d plant yourself in front of the television, crank the volume as high as it would go, and let the dings swell—unrestrained, electric, lifting you like vapour.
That is what made you this way. And that’s why, long after the dings stopped overwhelming you— long after Adedeji, of course—you found yourself always craving a different kind of high.
That’s why you’re here, in the cramped studio apartment of a random guy you met on Snapchat, choosing, for the first time, to smoke, to unravel, and to surrender yourself to a threesome.
There’s a lump in your throat. A hard, fibrous one. More of an obstruction than a lump, really—like something coarse and stringy caught in your glottis, keeping you from speaking. It’s nothing. Just your insecurities. It’s nothing.
Sit down.
When the boy passes you the blunt, take it (or don’t). It’s your call, really.
“You sabi smoke shey?” he asks, his tone laced with something that could be concern. Wonder if it’s truly concern you hear in his voice, and see in his eyes. If this random boy you met at another random Snapchat guy’s place could possibly care about you.
Smile. Don’t blush. You’ve got more beards than him. You need to—and how do I put this kindly?—act the part of the mature man you claim to be. You’re tired of not having fun, abi? Of your life being such a drag except when you go to IMAX on Sundays abi? Then, don’t dull. Take the blunt from him. It’s your lips, your lungs, your life, really. Do exactly what you saw him do with it. What that boy—Felix or Phillip or Fidelis—taught you to do when you are confronted with this brown-paper-sheathed drug clasped between your fingers.
“Oh my God, you don’t know how to smoke,” he had said, eyes lit. He was suddenly fascinated by you, you knew. This Omo-get-inside wan make I spoil am, he must have thought.
You coughed and coughed; that shit scratched your throat, burned like pepper. It was beyond your control really, until it wasn’t.
“Just take it in first, then hold it. Then, shzuuuu…”
He made this sound with his lips, teeth and tongue; you understood what the sound ought to represent: the sharp inhale, but you didn’t think you were capable of it. He saw you. Felix or Phillip or Fidelis saw you. He grabbed the blunt then.
“Watch me,” he instructed.
You sat at his feet, leaned in until your head was nearly between his legs, where you actually needed them to be, and watched. It was a slow, ceremonious thing choreographed with intention. His fingers dancing at the tip of the blunt, the flick of the lighter before a single flame burst forth, his lips accepting the blunt, the burnt offering. You were jealous of the blunt; it danced in his mouth, taunting you. How quickly you’d offer yourself to him if he asked. Why didn’t he ask?
Forget about that. Just do what he taught you. If the cough comes, suppress it. This guy looks bad and dangerous, the type to lose a boner if you make a fool of yourself. Do not make a fool of yourself. Inhale. Shzuuuu. Exhale.
Fuck. Lunge yourself at him. Isn’t that what you came for? Isn’t that the highness you’re after? The guy’s gotten his fix, hasn’t he? He can fuck you now, can’t he?
Yes, yes, so what are you still doing on the chair? How did I get to the bed? Who are you asking— me? You can’t feel your legs? Shake it off. Shake it off. That’s what people say, no?
Look around. Grab your phone. Or water. Or your phone. Or the bedsheet. Or water. Fuck. This is what it feels to be high?
Are your hands there? Is your face there? Are your lips there? Is your phone there? Your phone’s expensive. It has to be there. You don’t trust these boys. Your iPhone 17 has to be there. Is this what just a little spontaneous fun costs?
“Fuck it,” you muttered to yourself when the Snapchat guy, the other half of the pair waiting for you, texted. Fuck it. Regret saying fuck it. Regret is the brain’s way of editing the past with the wisdom of the present. Where did you hear that from again? Who was the human being that came up with that? Regret not having the wisdom of the future two hours ago when you replied, I’m on my way.
Bnxn and Fola’s Very Soon is on repeat. No, repeat doesn’t quite cut it. It’s a lilting, melancholic tune looping, recoiling, fastening its hooks to your ears, to your brain, to your mind. But it’s a rather gentle fastening, not a violent one. No one forced you to play it. The dangerous-looking boy had simply said he didn’t vibe to your music. Obongjayar. Taves. Masego. He wanted Fola. You hadn’t heard any of Fola’s songs before now, but you lied, said his songs were so underrated. You queued Very Soon, because you vibed with Bnxn. If you didn’t like it, it’d be much easier to pretend if you were listening to someone familiar. Welcome the gentle fastening.
Èrò bi ma ṣe para o je kin sún
Very, very soon
I’ll be better and I promise you, ah
You neither speak Yoruba nor understand it, but it’s speaking to you, this song. Shake the fucking bed. Get out of this loop. Get out of this loop. Punch the walls till your knuckles bruise. Is this how it feels to run mad? And was it always this swift, this stubborn?
Your mother came back home one morning in tears, saying that her favourite cousin, who you also called your cousin, since he was only five years older, was drugged and ran mad.
“Ifenna was just tearing his clothes one by one. His Versace shirt. His singlet. His chinos. He even broke his glasses.” Sochima, are you going to tear your clothes too?
Look at your laps. You’re wearing jeans. Between chinos and jeans, which would be harder to rip with bare hands?
From the corner of your eye, you see Snapchat guy folding into himself, fear contorting his face into something unrecognisable. Pity him. He was so alive in his pictures, and especially giddy when you sent a picture of your hard-on, oiled. It filled the screen, standing tall like a lighthouse. He said it was huge, and suddenly, you remembered that night with Adedeji as you held his penis, and he held yours. He hadn’t said anything, but he’d looked surprised.
You’d imagined a surprised look on Snapchat guy’s face as he asked, How many inches?
Measuring penises wasn’t something sane people did. But no one was sane in Lagos. So, you googled the length of a big black penis. You added overage. Just measured now cos of you. It’s a 10.
You imagined his eyes light up like when Felix or Phillip or Fidelis’ eyes lit up when he held your dick after underestimating it. Was it a blessing or a curse, this dick? Was it hereditary?
Do not think about your father. He left. He wrestled with your mum shamelessly, gathered his things like dead leaves one day, and left. Did he know about your surgery? That your kidneys had begun betraying you? That your mother slept upright in plastic hospital chairs while he vanished into another life? Well, if he did, he never bothered to show his face. So, that doesn’t make up for anything, really. Does he expect gadgets and clothes and shoes to make up for his perpetual absence?
There is a chaotic zigzagging before your eyes. You still can’t feel your legs. Your fingers triple. It doesn’t unnerve you that it happens; it settles like a leaf on a body of water. This world has always been looking for new ways to prove you aren’t human, anyways. To swallow you whole. Maybe you shouldn’t have been a part of it. You should be sent back to Mars. Where do human beings come from? Where did you come from? What made you this way?
When your parents first started hurling angry words at each other, you were seven. This shunted sapling with holes in his mouth. Their words were loud, scathingly so, even over the vehicles that zoomed on the highway. Each one launched like a grenade with the singular intention of inflicting more damage than the former. Their voices woke you up in the morning, infiltrating your dreams.
“Are you sure you’re the woman I married?” you remember your father asking, angrily.
“I know it’s my fault. Because I’m no more calling you brother out of respect, you can’t recognise me.”
“Yeah, I’m not doing this.”
“You think it surprises me that you don’t want to talk about anything? Go ahead, keep dodging hard conversations.”
“Sochima is upstairs, asleep.”
“Now you think about Sochima’s well-being. Did you know he fainted in school last week?”
“What? What?”
You rushed back inside, buried yourself under a duvet. Its weight would have been comforting if it wasn’t so smothering. You writhed out of its grasp, slipped under the bed, into its enveloping darkness. Your thoughts turned and turned. What did it mean for you to see your parents this way? Their voices rang louder by the moment, flying over your head, and crashing into different corners of the house. Was this how it felt to be caught in a war?
They started driving to work in different cars, sleeping in separate rooms. Your life had already been severed, but maybe it was more of a fracture than a severance, because they thought you didn’t notice all these things and so coerced themselves to play little roles they had sworn to play when they got married, before they had you. You would have breakfasts and dinners together, in silence, and when your father would try to break the silence with a joke, your mother would laugh so hard that the cutlery and table joined her. There was something so scrupulously revealing about coercion. It was in the darting back and forth of the eyes, in the stillness or rather feverish quivering of the lips.
At night, you would watch a grainy Nollywood movie in the living room, your parents at your sides, warming you, yet stifling you still. You could hear their breathing over the movie, yet they didn’t utter a sound, like they were dead inside. Dead to each other.
When did things get so bad between them? How hadn’t you seen it coming? Your mates were there thinking about cartoons and playdates yet here you were, pretending to be oblivious to your parents’ fighting, thinking it would fix their marriage. You’d get ready for school by yourself, eat anything as breakfast; some mornings, your urine was very dark; other days, there was blood in it, and there were times when you spent hours in the toilet because you were vomiting everything you ate. Still, you didn’t want them to worry about you. What if that was the reason for their constant bickering?
Years later, at nine, Adedeji would come along, the only boy you remember loving, who was eight but looked five, who would look at you like you were the bane of his existence. Pupils dilated, gaze unflinching. It would have been creepy had it not been so devastatingly charming. You wouldn’t realise what that look truly meant until you watched Your Name Engraved Herein with a focus so intense it paralysed other parts of you that weren’t your eyes. The hairs all over your body stood at that bathroom scene. Chiang holding Birdy so close, so tenderly, as though without him his existence would be meaningless. Blood flowed down the side of your neck to your dick and it pulsed with urgency. Was this a fleeting hunger, or a stalwart desire?
You remembered the night with Adedeji in your bathroom. He’d witnessed one of your parents’ tantrums and peed on himself, startled. The stain, a testament of your family’s abnormality, encircled his trousers so vividly there was nowhere to hide it.
“Pick any trouser,” you said, an unusual stillness in your voice. “Or shorts. I’ve never seen you in shorts.”
Was it pots and pans and pestles you hadn’t heard being flung about before? By then, you had already found me in your mind. There were jingles there too: tunes from cartoons and video games, Freddie Mercury in that one music video clad in leather jackets and skin-tight trousers, microphone stand clenched in his fist as he belted lyrics like sadness was nothing more than a myth people chose to believe. There were also all the things you had no business watching at your age. But who was going to stop you? These parents who forgot you existed whenever they were consumed by each other’s fury? And even when they did remember, after their anger had simmered into something quieter and more shameful, it became their turn to tread carefully around you. Then wishes became horses, and you rode every single one of them until their hooves split sore against the earth. Maybe it was you, indeed, who made them that way.
The room’s spinning now, not your eyes anymore. The wardrobe, the table, the fan, and the bed you’re seated on are all fixed to the ceiling. It’s definitely the room. How can you find a way out of here if you’re upside down?
Tilt your head to the left. Snapchat guy is still at that corner, but his lips are moving. His hair is dyed gold. Has it always been dyed gold?
“What’s happening to him?” you hear him ask. The voice is soft, sparing, scared. You’re sure it’s him.
“Na just high e high,” the dangerous-looking guy replies. “E no go die.”
The groggy voice accompanied with Fola’s crooning scares you. It is a rather torpid unease that fills you with sick uncertainties. Try to move. Jesus. Pinch yourself. Jesus. Bite yourself. Jesus. Will you ever get out of this? Will you ever get to see your mum again, and tell her that she tried her best? Will you tell your father how much you love him and hate him and love him still because he’s the closest thing to a father you’d ever have?
There was this episode of Black Mirror you watched, where this guy who’d made a mistake was trapped in a nightmare as retribution, doomed to relive it and relive it and relive it, while the world watched. Sochima, is this the end?
Every time you watched something, you thought, if only so sparsely, of Adedeji. To keep your mind from sinking into the dark abyss that is your imagination, think of him now. Of how you went to his house to escape the noise of yours. But it was in no way quiet, this house. There was always someone pounding something, dragging something or hammering something so it came correct. You know—the everyday, unselfconscious sounds that make a home feel lived-in. Did your parents ever even wonder where you were then?
Recall that night when you woke in the middle of the darkness, lying on the same narrow bed Adedeji shared with some uncle of his. You found yourself at the very edge, drenched in sweat that didn’t feel, or smell, like your own. Recall rising quietly and moving to the side where Adedeji slept. Recall rolling him gently toward the uncle and laying down beside him until his bare skin brushed yours, his scent warm and human in the air between you. You could hear the soft, steady rhythm of his breathing. And when he shifted, curling instinctively toward you like a baby in a bassinet, you saw how serene his face was in sleep: his thick brows knitted, his pinched nose flaring with each breath, his lips parted. They smelled like ginger. In that moment, more than anything, you wanted to press your lips against his.
It;s not even in my power and I’m telling you
Mo fé k’everybody hear this tune
O mo mi o, o de kin fe ni suru, ah
Yes, yes, sing along with Fola. Anything to keep you sane. Anything to save yourself from your suffocating thoughts. The plan had only ever been to meet the Snapchat guy. Just him. You arrived expecting awkward conversation, maybe a blow job, maybe nothing at all. But then his friend opened the door while you were just settling in—lean, gold-toothed, dangerous-looking in the deliberate way some Lagos boys are. Your chest tightened then. You had been trying to connect to his speaker, but you froze, forgetting what you were to do, and instead found yourself, briefly, imagining a threesome blooming out of nothing. And when Snapchat guy confirmed his friend was into men, that your fantasy was not an impossibility, you decided to put that sudden, reckless enthusiasm to use.
You see, all you wanted was to be the centre of attention for these two men—offering what Snapchat guy needed, and craving everything the dangerous-looking one seemed capable of giving. You don’t deserve this. Say a little word of prayer. No? You’re still mad at Him, I understand, but for what exactly?
The painting of the naked woman on the wall is lopsided. Her skin is shimmering in the dusk of the backdrop. A wrapper hangs loosely across her shoulders, falls down her back, over her buttocks, but doesn’t quite cover all of it. Stare at the little part it doesn’t cover. Maybe if you follow that, the room will spin back to its original position. Don’t query me for saying “maybe.” I’m not the one you’re mad at, and I know only everything you know.
While you wait for my suggestion to work, why don’t you think about all the stupid things you’ve done, like agreeing to smoke what you did not know, to get the attention of a boy who needed to get high to be into you?
Remember Fuhad and Sahad and Sadiq? The Muslim Jonas Brothers in summer school? Take them apart one by one, like how you eat your oysters. Fuhad didn’t like you, you know. Unless, of course, the fun stuff you had was a part of you. The Nintendo switch, the PS Vita, the iPhone X you only used to call your mother and text the gateman. Who suggested the gift for his girlfriend—him? One of your mother’s Swarovski necklaces she wouldn’t notice went missing? Shift + Delete. Fuhad’s not worth this mental gymnastics please, not even now that you’re high.
You remember Sahad loved to get high, yeah? Or so you imagined. You had these fantasies of him when you were alone with your thoughts. And how couldn’t you, when he was this chill boy who strutted around with his hands in his pockets and headphones always on, unaware of just how feral his gaze was. Fantasies are ridiculously comforting things, aren’t they? But you wanted more, and stupidly went for what you felt you deserved. Followed him in a keke on the last day of Summer school, dropped where he dropped, and just walked behind him, staring at his Death Note fanny pack and his Converse sneakers and his Hermès belt and his Ben 10 beanie, not quite realising where he was leading you to, until he reached a gate, and just before pushing it open, looked over his shoulder and spotted you.
“Hey, I know you. Are you following me?”
You remember his words clear as day. He didn’t sound angry, upset or curious, even. He was just asking, “Are you following me?” But you took to your heels as though a wild animal were chasing you, as though rain was falling and you didn’t want to get soaked.
This is what regret does to a person: it seeps into their brain, distorts their memory, makes them orchestrate different ways to repeat a happening so it turns out as desired. That’s why you went to that house over and over again expecting to stumble into him, until one day, you found the courage to knock.
“Who’s there?” a woman’s soft voice greeted you. Although tempting, you didn’t run this time.
You said, “It’s me, Sochima,” like she was supposed to know who you were.
The first thing you noticed when the gate opened were her red eyes. You apologised, “Oh oh, sorry to disturb you ma.” Despite how many times you’d seen your mother that way, there was still something prickly and unsettling about seeing an adult in tears.
“It’s okay, son.” She wiped her eyes slowly. “You were a friend of Sadiq’s?”
Oh yeah, Sadiq. Sahad was the tall one whose father moved him and his siblings across the country and Benin to spread the Islamic faith. The one who agreed to go on a date with you, but cancelled because his family was moving again. The one who stopped replying to your messages after you said you’d pay him, thinking he was lying and just couldn’t bring himself to say he didn’t want to date you. You were always terrible with names. Even more so, with feelings. Names tethered people to feelings, gave them meaning. And you couldn’t afford that. You’d rather feel them, lose them and move on. That’s why you quietly retreated after Sadiq’s mother’s question. Because how could you explain to a grieving mother that the only thing her son ever said to you was Hey, I know you. Are you following me?
Are you following this? You do see the pattern, don’t you? If you don’t, let me break it down for you. You’re fucked up. Redeemable, maybe, but fucked up still.
Remember the gateman? Not the burly one you used to rush to your window to scope whenever you heard the sound of his bathroom door creaking open, or slamming shut. The cute one with the shaven beards. The one who looked up to you and adored you, even though you were much younger. This was after the surgery, after the kidney transplant. You’d like to think it was what made you this way, what imbued in you this crippling and frankly, very desperate, sense of incompleteness.
That afternoon in Chennai, right after the surgery, you woke up thinking this: that a part of you had been replaced with another’s. Your thighs felt sore, there was a swelling at your side, and you couldn’t even sit up without flinching, but you wanted to see the donor and thank them, in spite of all this pain. Your life wouldn’t be about constant dialysis and hospital visits and you would still be on immunosuppressants, but you could eat whatever you wanted because of them. You were fourteen, then.
On the eleventh day in the hospital, the night before your discharge, you woke with your head feeling strangely weightless, your toes tingling with a quiet current. Much like how you feel now. Raise your hands to your face, as you did then, studying the pallor of your fingers before wandering the wards. Remember that wave of emotion that crashed over you when you saw the children there—pale and bony bodies tethered to life support; urine trickling into bags; heads, stomachs, and feet grotesquely swollen, stretched beyond what seemed possible. Was it unworthiness you felt? Or was it the thought that one of those children might have deserved this chance more than you? Do you still feel unworthy of this kidney? If given the choice, would you surrender to death rather than endure this kind of survival?
You could only blame your parents so much, really, because the truth was there were children of divorced parents who ended up loving their lives even more after the split. Two Christmases. Twice the birthday gifts. The thrill of telling one parent they’d be sleeping over at the other’s, only to slip away into the night, toward a pulsing club, a roaring concert, or the dim, smoky chaos of a house party with a special someone.
On this Children of Divorced Parents (CODP) group chat, they gave tips on how to manipulate both parents to do your bidding, to reap the fruits of their separation. The messier, they said, the easier. If there was anything your parents were, it was messy. But you didn’t want to make them feel worse than they already did. Or maybe you did, but that want wasn’t nearly as aching as the need you had to be loved. Maybe you should’ve done that instead of texting this gateman everyday, asking if you could talk.
What did you even talk about when you went down to his little, scrunched up house eh? Okay, his salary was twenty thousand, not enough. You said, How can I help?
Don’t bother, small oga, he’d tell you. I’ll survive.
Yet you brought him food every night, and while your mother slept, he’d tell you tales about his childhood in Kano: how locusts, famine, and Boko Haram struck his village in such quick succession that they came to the conclusion that they were cursed. One good trait that came with the messiness of your life was your attentiveness. When you listened, you immersed yourself in whatever the other person said; mentally taking notes, even. There was the batting of his eyelashes whenever his eyes itched. You watched to see if he’d use his fingers to relieve the itch, and if he’d leave the hand suspended in the air, dangling. He never did. However, there was the shocking fluidity of his speech; how he even said things like “we were exasperated that night after playing football,” or “you think the sun in Lagos is sweltering abi, come to Kano.” They weren’t big words per say, but you’d notice anytime they emerged from his lips, simply because they had emerged from his lips.
The night you graduated from university, while the party your parents threw raged on in the compound, or whatever became of a celebration when the one it was to honour was missing, you’d asked him to meet you in your car, parked just outside the gate.
I’m coming, medium oga, he replied. He’d added medium after you got into the university and became rather scarce. Perhaps it was merely a tease borne from over familiarity, perhaps it was something more, but it was one you entertained, and revelled in, even.
You drove around the estate that night twice, listening to him talk about how he was learning yahoo from one guy that lived at the next junction from your house. He showed you the guy’s gate. Through its slits, you could see his fleet of cars. Were you impressed that he had found a way to survive? Or were you disappointed that it had been fraudulent?
He showed you a chat with a white client. Then played a voice note. It belonged to a woman, an actual woman and not one cooked with Artificial Intelligence.
“Na my babe voice,” he added, beaming with pride.
You hid your emotions well. It was quite easy actually. Do it now, as you move about the room, crashing into the wall and the fridge and the bed, trying to put your belt through the hoops on your trousers.
Your eyebrows pinched, say, “I have to get home, mehn. Got work tomorrow.”
The next day is a Friday, so you do have work actually—sitting through meetings your mother doesn’t want to. But you can skip if you want to. Just don’t. You don’t even trust these guys enough to sleep here.
“Bro, you no fit comot here without fixing this bed oh,” the dangerous-looking guy says, a sachet of water clenched between his teeth, heightening his predatory air. Glance at the bed. Its wooden frame has caved in around the mattress, as though bracing for some illicit coupling. You can’t believe you did that, I know, but don’t let this disbelief show on your face. He leans in, making sure his words land in case you’re too high, too disoriented to have caught them the first time. “You go run transfer for the bed oh.”
It’s not an issue. There has never been a moment in your life where money was an issue. Reply “No yawa. Just call your account number.”
As he calls his account number, stare at your phone. The numbers and fonts and wallpaper are fuzzy abi? Don’t let him see that you can’t see what you’’e typing. Seeing in itself is overrated. You’ve had a phone since you were what—eight? You should know the digits by heart. You should know the letters by heart.
You do know the letters by heart.
Isn’t that why you were able to type with one hand while the other was on the steering wheel as you drove round the estate that night? You looked at the roads; they stretched bare, not a single car in sight. Then, you turned to look at this gateman, watching him scroll through his WhatsApp, contemplating whether to send this message or not. Why couldn’t you just say it instead? Why did it have to be a text—an evidence of your carnal hankering?
“What the fuck is this?” he asked you, flashing his phone in your face. “Eh, guy, what the fuck is this?”
He’d never called your name before; you wondered then if he knew it at all. There was a stark hatred in his eyes. You knew it was hatred, because you’d seen it in the stares of your parents. Not at you, of course, but at each other. Theirs weren’t as piercing as his though. His eyes didn’t leave your face, his chest heaved heedlessly with anger. The anger was confusing, truly. To you, he was overreacting. But maybe his reactions were valid. Maybe it was abrupt; you should’ve waited a day or two or a month. The distance between your faces was so close, you thought to make it worse, to steal a kiss. What’s the worst he can do—slap you? But his eyes were dead; you were dead to him, you knew. Had he always been this homophobic? What did you expect him to respond to Wanna suck you off? No, thanks for asking though?
“Guy, answer me, what the hell is this?”
You didn’t think you’d need the excuse, so you were quite unprepared for it. “No be you I wan send am to, na mistake,” you stuttered.
“Abeg drop me here,” he ordered. This boy who knew the taste of casserole and pizza and strawberries and bubblegum ice-cream because of you.
Fucking ingrate, you cursed under your breath. But was he really an ingrate, Sochima? Why did you just have this urge to put all your relationships on self-destruct?
The only person you have told all of these is Deji. He sends laughing emojis after each narration, but somehow you know behind his screen, he isn’t laughing.
When he’d texted you years ago, the first thing you remembered were the shorts you lent him that night.
Crazy thing is eh, I’m wearing them right now, he said, and sent a picture before you could ask for it. A chuckle escaped your lips; you hadn’t realised then how long it’d been since you smiled until you did.
One evening, while you were flicking between Tinder and Grindr and Bumble, he called. He was slouched over a long table in a light-starved hall, a pen tucked neatly behind his ear. He looked different. Strikingly different. Good different. His moustache curled over his lips, delicate and divine like the petals of a hydrangea. You remember asking, at the very start of the call, if he oiled it—only to be interrupted by the obstinate stutter of bad network, his voice splintering into static, his face dissolving into a grainy blur until the call died and he rang back.
And when he asked, You were saying something?
You answered, with a calm that betrayed the stir beneath your ribs: You look different.
Don’t wonder what he’ll say when you tell him about today. The future is no more uncertain than the present; stay here. Stagger into the street while strangers gawk and whisper. Lagosians love to fold their arms and watch, you know. They live for murmurs, for lips that twitch with gossip. It distracts them from the slow unravelling of their own lives. Walk, despite them, toward your house, through its glistening gate. You made it through tonight.
Steady yourself when you spot your mother in the living room, her eyes sharp with worry, fine wrinkles carved into the corners like tree branches.
“Sochima, ebee ka ị nọ?” she asks, voice taut.
Don’t move closer. Say, “You don’t have to worry about me, Mum,” even though you know she always will. Blow her a kiss. Say goodnight. Tell her you love her. And with the paranoia and haze of whatever you smoked still pulsing through your veins, text your father: I don’t hate you.
And when Adedeji calls, even while your eyelids are leaden, even when your legs won’t obey and your voice might slur, answer. If he asks you to say something random, as he often does when neither of you wants to end the call yet can’t quite dig up a new topic, tell him about the night before your discharge, back in that hospital in Chennai.
“Hope you know you deserve to be loved,” he’d say. “Hope you know I love you.”
He’s said it twice now, both times over video calls, since you’ve yet to be reunited in person. And each time he said it, a slight uneasiness stirred in you. You swallowed it down, and it sank into your stomach, settling among the memories and afflictions that shaped you into who you are. He graduates in two weeks. You could go see him in Ibadan—truly, what’s stopping you?
Allow yourself to become the boy you were with him: reserved, sharp-tongued, yet still capable of dancing and laughing as though no one were watching. Yes, sometimes you wonder what might have become of you if your parents had never sold that old house by the highway, or if you had never lived there at all, witnessing all the different ways people try to escape this brutal, smattering thing called living; if your parents had stayed together, if your blood had not betrayed you, flooding your kidneys with an inflammation that consumed until it had its fill. But none of those things define you. Despite them, and beyond them, you are still you.
So put on your headphones. Listen to Freddie Mercury’s voice as he reminds you: you’re a shooting star, leaping through the sky like a tiger, defying the laws of gravity. There’s no stopping you now.
