Your heart was beating so loudly you could hear it. Thump. Thump. Thump. Honestly, it could’ve perfectly led a marching band for a thousand soldiers.

The strange thing was that you couldn’t even tell what exactly you were anxious about. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. Your birthday. Your exam results. Your future. Your past. The pressure you’ve put on yourself. The expectations you’ve carried for years.

It was one thing and two hundred others.

You even considered switching off your phone completely so nobody could reach you. Just disappear for twenty-four hours. Let the day come and go without you having to participate in it.

Then Prince sent you a WhatsApp video. Four minutes. Four minutes of someone intentionally sitting down to tell you how much they loved you. What you meant to them. How grateful they were that you existed.

That did something to you. No. It undid something in you.

It broke you open. Tore through every defence you’d spent years building. Ripped every wall you’d carefully stacked brick by brick until all that was left was a girl sitting on her bed crying over a four-minute video.

You watched it again. Then again. Then again. Four times in a row. Each replay peeling away another layer you didn’t even realise you were wearing.

And then dawn arrived with the messages one after another. Paragraphs. Emails.

Voice notes. Entire epistles. People telling you how they met you. The conversations they still remembered. The kindness you probably forgot showing them. The encouragement that stayed with them years later. The communities you’d built. The spaces you’d made safer simply because you existed in them.

And your first instinct...was disbelief.

“No.” “This can’t be me.” “They’ve exaggerated.” “There must be some mistake.”

Because surely they couldn’t be talking about you. Effortlessly kind? Compassionate? Safe? Cheta? Mba nu. You nearly argued with over fifty people in your head because accepting their words somehow felt harder than doubting them. Then something funny occurred to you.

The Bible says that in the mouth of two or three witnesses, every truth shall be established.

Well...there were over fifty witnesses today. At some point, denial stops being humility and starts becoming stubbornness. Snap out of it, Chichetaram. These people cannot all be wrong.

I’ve watched you for years. Yes, Very creepy. I know. You’d probably report me but stay with me first.

I’ve watched you become this strange, beautiful, eccentric young woman. I’ve watched the girl who spent years believing she wasn’t enough.

Do you remember how deeply you disliked yourself? Not just disliked, nah because it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the hatred within. Despised. Loathed.

Your dark skin, your body, your face, your very existence. Every morning felt like another opportunity to wish you had been born inside somebody else’s body. Nothing you ever did was enough. Nothing. You were your own harshest critic long before the world ever tried. And because you didn’t think you deserved love, you went looking for it in dangerous places.

You wanted people to choose you, to see you, to stay. You craved affection so badly that sometimes you accepted crumbs and called them banquets. You remember, don’t you?

You were so insecure about your body that you actually started saving for plastic surgery before you even turned eighteen. You wanted to be fairer, thicker, less flat, more beautiful, more desirable, as though changing your body would finally convince you that you deserved occupying it.

And then there was friendship. You wanted your own people. Not acquaintances, not convenience. A tribe. People who would pour into you the way you poured into them. But your empathy always outran your self-preservation. You entered people’s fires carrying buckets of water and somehow forgot your own clothes could burn too.

So you got hurt. Again. And again. And again. Until eventually you became very good at patching yourself back together.

But today... Today, I need you to stop.

Look around you, love. No, really look. Do you understand what happened today? These weren’t just birthday messages. They were evidence. Evidence against every lie you’ve spent years believing about yourself.

You thought you weren’t enough. Fifty people disagreed. You thought you weren’t memorable. People remembered conversations you had forgotten. You thought you hadn’t done much with your twenty-two years. People wrote paragraphs explaining how your life had quietly changed theirs.

Do you see it now? You did it. Maybe not in the loud, award-winning, headline-making kind of way but in the smaller way that matters infinitely more.

You left people better than you met them. You gave them hope. You made them laugh. You gave them language for feelings they couldn’t explain. You made strangers feel like they belonged. You built communities that looked suspiciously like the ones you’d spent years praying someone would build for you. You became the safe place you were once desperately searching for.

And I think that’s extraordinary.

Do you understand what you’ve spent the last few years doing?

You’ve been taking every wound life handed you and quietly transforming it into shelter for someone else. The structure you lacked as a writer became The Ink House. The exploitation you experienced volunteering turned you into the kind of leader people genuinely enjoy working with. The safety you longed for became the hugs you now wrap around other people. The understanding you desperately needed became the way you instinctively sit with people in their own darkness.

You never let your pain end with you. You kept passing on healing instead.

What a beautiful thing that is.

Life has thrown lemons at your face so many times.And somehow...you keep throwing yourself a goddamn lemonade party.

Resilience. That’s the word. Not perfection. Not brilliance. Resilience.

I’m proud of the woman you’ve become. I’m proud that you’ve stopped pretending to have it all figured out. I’m proud that your vulnerability has become a bridge instead of something you hide behind. I’m proud that despite the people who hurt you... despite the men who violated your trust... despite the heartbreak... despite every reason you had to become bitter... your softness survived. Your light survived.

You survived.

And today, all those seeds you’ve been planting for years... you got to sit beneath their shade.

So breathe. Receive it. Don’t argue with it. Don’t minimise it. Don’t explain it away. Just receive it. Because this love...you’ve earned nothing. And yet here it is anyway.

Funny how grace works: a few hours ago, you wanted to switch off your phone so nobody could reach you. Imagine if you had; you would’ve missed every single reminder that you are deeply, fiercely loved. So the next time your mind tells you to disappear... Stay.

Because somewhere, someone is probably typing a message that will remind you exactly who you are. You are loved, Cheta. Not just by me, but by so many people out there, and I hope today has finally proven that to you.

You are doing well. You have done well.

Keep shining, my guy. There are still so many lives left to touch. Never lose yourself. Keep your head up like the empress that you are. Never lose your kindness, your softness, or that stubborn childlike spirit that still believes the world can be beautiful.

Life will not always be easy—you already know that—but I have watched you survive every version of hard that has ever met you, and I am certain that whatever comes next, you will survive that too.

Happy Birthday, Chichetaram Victoria. Happy Birthday, my darling. Twenty-two looks beautiful on you.

God, I love you so much that I’d marry you if we weren’t the same person. And if there is another world after this one, I’d like to do that world with you too. Keep conquering. Keep doing exploits. The world is yours.

P.S. Open your heart to romance again, babe. I know the last few attempts have looked like God was personally conducting a social experiment with your emotional wellbeing. But still, try again. Even if your heart gets broken. Think of the Substack content. Think of the character development. Think of the literary masterpieces waiting to be born. Suffering has funded your writing career long enough for us to know the pattern.

And to anyone reading this who cares about Cheta, please do your civic duty: if you know a fine, emotionally intelligent, intentional, stable man who won’t stress my babe, abeg do the Lord’s work and set her up. She deserves soft love too. Tanss.

With so much pride and love,

The one who knows you the most.

You.

I’m almost certain you just glanced at your calendar to make sure you didn’t accidentally step into some time portal that skipped you a few months backwards.

Relax, my darling. You are right about today’s date, and so am I. Today is Thursday, April 16th. And it is absolutely not my birthday.

Sit with it for a second. Don’t fight it just yet. I’ll explain.

But first, I need to warn you that this is going to be one hell of a read. So, this is your cue to grab a cup of coffee. Actually, scratch that. That’s a very “white people in Pinterest cafés” thing to do. Instead, go and serve yourself a generous plate of smoky jollof rice and beef and throw in a bottle of chilled Coke. If your account balance and the economy are currently exchanging gbas gbos, then garri will do. Get a plate, soak it in, add sugar and milk and some groundnuts. Give it a beautiful stir, then pull up a chair, or better still, wrap yourself in a duvet, find the most comfortable corner in your house and settle in.

Now...You’re comfortable. Let’s begin.

You’re probably rolling your eyes already.

“Cheta, abeg. Get on with it. What do you mean today is April 16th?”

Fair enough. Here’s the thing. As I’m writing this, today is April 16th. I’m lying on my bed with Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors playing softly in the background, trying to wrestle this essay out of my head before it disappears forever. But you’ll be reading this sometime in my future. If everything goes according to plan, today, for you, is July 13th. And July 13th is still not my birthday. Not until a week from now, anyway - the 20th.

I actually considered waiting until April 20th just so I could dramatically write something like, “You’re reading this three months into my future,” like those unnecessarily mysterious movie narrators. But I know myself. If I waited that long, either I’d lose all the sweet little details that make stories taste like stories, or my good friend, procrastination, would convince me that maybe this piece wasn’t worth writing after all. So here we are. April 16th, my present and your past, and July 13th, your present and my future.

The funny thing is, I've wanted to write about birthdays not because I particularly enjoy them. Ironically, because I don't. Or maybe... because I haven't known how to, and today, a friend's birthday finally gave me a place to begin. I was mindlessly scrolling through her WhatsApp status when I saw the first slide; it was a meme, some cartoon character holding a birthday cake with the caption: Happy Birthday to Me.

The next slide was a video with the text: POV: Public announcement that it’s my birthday and then another slide of wishlists. Wigs. Perfumes. Cash gifts.

smiles

Yes. This is where I insert that atrocity you people use instead of emojis. Now, watching her excitement over her birthday stirred something inside me: a bit of jealousy, a bit of irritation and a lot of curiosity. Because while she was joyfully announcing her birthday to the world, I realised I’d spent the last few years trying to make mine as... quiet as possible. And that made me wonder...When exactly did birthdays stop feeling exciting?

As a child, birthdays were magical for me. I remember I always looked forward to them and this wasn’t necessarily because we had elaborate parties. Nope, we didn’t. There were no bouncing castles or photographers asking everyone to “look here!” No themed cakes. No matching family outfits. Far from it, in fact, I didn’t have my first birthday cake until I turned twenty.

Birthdays in my house were much quieter.

If and when my father remembered, he’d call you into his room so he could usher you into your new year with prayers and some long kabashing. Then, next up, anointing oil would be generously applied to your forehead and some poured on your head for good measure because apparently one point of contact wasn’t enough. My mum on her own part, would hug you so tightly you’d wonder if oxygen was really that important and then smother your cheeks with kisses while repeatedly while singing “Happy Birthday” in whatever key her happiness chose that morning.

And my sisters? Ah. My sisters were the ones who made birthdays feel like birthdays. I still remember one year when Simmy bought me three novels. Three. I don’t think she fully understood what she’d done. To another child, it might have just been books. To me? She might as well have handed me three passports into three entirely different worlds. Those little things meant the world to me because they made me feel seen. Birthdays, to little Cheta, weren’t about getting older. They were about feeling special, feeling loved, feeling like, for just one day, the universe had looked in my direction and smiled.

Then I turned eighteen and everything changed.

My eighteenth birthday featured sexual assault from someone I believed was my friend. After a birthday dinner that went well, he decided his kindness had an invoice and it was time to collect. I don’t remember so much except deciding never to tell anybody till this day. I did what Nigerians are Olympic champions at doing. I swallowed it, buried it somewhere deep inside my chest and continued living as though nothing had happened.

Except... something had and it had taken something from me…

Because the following year, July 20th came around again. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t excited. I was anxious. There was this heaviness I couldn’t explain. People wished me happy birthday and I smiled. I replied with “thank you.” I reposted statuses. I appreciated the messages. But inside? Inside, I wanted the day to end already. Inside, I was unhappy, I was heavy, thorough emptiness.

I thought it was just going to be that year but then the next birthday came, and the next, and it was all the same, struggling to get through overwhelming amounts of anxiety, inadequacy, emptiness and all manner of negative emotions. And someway along the line, birthdays lost their touch with me, became ordinary days, sometimes even days I dreaded and while I blamed the assault, it was more than that. It was my interpretation of it.

Somewhere in my subconscious I had registered that my eighteenth birthday was evidence that wanting things was dangerous. That being excited was dangerous, that looking forward to something was dangerous, that receiving kindness was dangerous because what if it came with hidden terms and conditions? I started to wonder if maybe he was right, maybe I had expected too much, maybe I shouldn’t have let him pay, maybe I shouldn’t have accepted the dinner, maybe I shouldn’t have been so excited.

So, I started to condition my mind to stop expecting too much from people, regardless of whom they were and what they were to me.

I knew disappointment was one emotion I definitely didn’t know how to deal with because I’d always crumble. So, over the years my brain came up with a brilliant survival strategy.

“Cheta,” it whispered, “if you don’t expect much, nobody can disappoint you or hurt you.”

Genius right? Yes. Terrible but genius. So, instantly, I stopped making noise about my birthdays, I stopped counting down, I conditioned my mind to not care whether people remembered or whether they forgot. That was easier.

But then, watching that status that day and seeing that friend excited, unashamedly excited, posting memes, making wishlists, reminding people and making requests, I started to ask myself more questions…. ‘‘Why did I become so afraid of wanting?’’

Because if I’m being truthful, every time I’d see people post birthday wishlists, I’d just think,

“Ha. Isn’t this a bit much?” “Isn’t this too entitled?” “Shouldn’t people just gift you if they genuinely want to?”

But the more I sat with these thoughts, the more I realised they were saying more about me than them. I was jealous they had given themselves the freedom and will to freely want these things, they had given themselves permission to say, "This is what would make me happy." And I never gave that to myself, I had shrunk my desires for contentment. I had killed off the little bubbly one in me who believed July 20th was the most important day on the calendar. I had mistaken pretending not to care for emotional maturity and that asking would make me come off as needy…that expecting would make me vulnerable and vulnerability had betrayed me once before.

Then I started thinking about birthdays themselves. The fact they don’t exist in isolation, they’ve become mirrors that expose the silent transaction we’ve built around relationships. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we turned birthdays into accounting books. We gift, not because we love giving, but because somewhere in our minds we’re already calculating the return on investment.

“I bought her perfume last year but he didn’t even wish me.”

“I attended their birthday party and they didn’t attend mine.”

“I sent this babe ₦20,000 and she has the audacity to send ₦2,000.”

It’s almost like celebrations have become some twisted way of keeping scores and I hate it. Because what really is the purpose of gifts if at the end it creates debt? Is it really love if it’s coming with receipts? Is it still generosity if it has become collateral for access to another human being?

These may be very human wants and thoughts but if not put in check, they turn celebrations into obligations, a fucking chore. What should be moments of affection turns into annual audits of who owes whom.

If my eighteenth birthday taught me anything, it’s that entitlement is one of the ugliest things a person can wear. No gift, no dinner, no amount of money spent on somebody should ever become evidence that they owe you themselves.

Whilst, I don’t have answers to all these, there’s one certain thing for me - This year, I turn twenty-two and for the first time in a long time...I think I’d like to be excited again. Not because I expect the world to stop spinning for one day but because I’ve realised that my birthday belongs to me first before it belongs to anybody else. My joy shouldn’t depend on how other people celebrate me.

So, this year, I’m doing something I’ve never done before. I’m making a birthday wishlist. Yes. The same me who used to cringe at people posting account numbers. But, that’s not the point, it is that I’m finally giving myself permission to admit that there are things I’d genuinely like without shame or guilt, without apologising for existing. And I think every year from now on, I’d like to do one thing I’ve never done before. Maybe I’ll travel or host strangers for lunch or buy myself flowers or I’ll disappear into a bookstore.

I don’t know yet. But I do know this. Nobody gets to take the meaning of July 20th away from me anymore. I can’t get back the birthdays I’ve lost but now, I refuse to lose the ones I still have.

So if you'd like to be part of my twenty-second chapter, I've left my little wishlist somewhere below. There are items I’d love to be gifted in there and at the end activities I’d really love to engage in, feel free to recommend and suggest more activities for me.

You know what I’d actually love just as much on that day? Tell me something specific you’ve noticed about me. Not just “Happy Birthday.” Write me an epistle, a letter, tell me the kind thing I did that stayed with you, remind me of how we met, recount a conversation with me you still remember or the version of me you’ve come to know that no one else knows.

Words have always been one of my favourite gifts anyway.

And before you leave, answer me this.

When was the last time you let yourself be genuinely excited about your birthday?Or have you, like I did, been surviving it instead of celebrating it?

And if there’s one thing about co-working spaces, it’s the aura that it carries. That aura of core seriousness and optimum productivity. People are seated with their laptops open, typing away furiously like the fate of the global economy depended on whatever they were working on, earphones are usually plugged in, faces very serious and straight. Like every single person is looking very well employed (makes you wonder who are now the ones complaining they don’t have jobs), intellectually superior and almost one software update away from being the next Dangote of Africa.

Or so it seems.

Now, I had come in to study, and in that process, I realised something disturbing about myself. Stay with me now.

I was reading up on Cardiovascular Physiology, specifically Cardiac automaticity, and then I got saturated to the point where my neurons collectively unionised and told me, “Madam, if you don’t rest us right now, we’ll all resign.” So, I decided to open Substack to read a few articles, and that’s exactly when I noticed this disturbing thing about me.

Every single time someone walked towards my direction, close enough to possibly glimpse my screen, I’d immediately switch tabs back to my anatomy slides or YouTube tutorials on some medically horrifying topic. Like, though I was hiding pornography. Meanwhile, I was just reading essays. And the crazy thing was that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, yet I’d panic and feel instant shame, or maybe it was fear or better still, that invisible pressure to look serious in spaces where everybody looks serious.

Because somewhere, somehow in my head, physiology and anatomy tabs looked serious enough, respectable, coding screens looked super intelligent, spreadsheets looked important, and anything that didn’t give off ‘‘strange’’ like reading essays, writing creatively or scrolling through social media and brainstorming on content ideas wasn’t serious enough. It was like my brain was whispering, ‘‘this one no be real work’’.

And it got me thinking how bad this gets for me, because sometimes I’m ACTUALLY working. Like creating content calendars for clients. Real paid work o. But if someone walks by, I suddenly feel the urge to switch tabs to something that looks confusing and technologically violent. Something with graphs, dark mode, random symbols, terminal-looking nonsense. The kind of screen you glance at and immediately think: “Yeah. This person definitely says things like API integration.” What the hell is API integration even?

That’s when it hit me.

I wasn’t managing productivity. I was managing perception. I wanted strangers to LOOK at my screen and subconsciously classify me as and serious, ambitious, intelligent, disciplined, hardworking. Because again, somewhere in my head, “looking productive” started feeling just as important as actually being productive.

Here’s the thing: Coworking spaces unintentionally turn into performance theatres. Everybody becomes both worker and audience. Nobody may actually care what you’re doing, but the environment pressures everyone into performing ambition.

So we all sit there together typing aggressively, opening intimidating tabs, adjusting posture, looking deeply focused…while somebody somewhere is literally rereading the same sentence for the 14th time because their brain left the group chat three hours ago.

So, I’m sitting here, writing this piece and suddenly understanding that it’s more of a society stereotype, the meaning we attach to what ‘‘serious work’’ looks like. And that leads me to ask, ‘‘When did we start believing that work, any kind of work, has to look a certain way to be valid?’’ And maybe that’s why so many of us feel guilty the moment our work stops looking difficult enough. Because apparently, productivity now has an aesthetic.

If your screen isn’t filled with spreadsheets, graphs, code, fifty Chrome tabs, or some deeply intimidating software interface, it somehow feels less respectable. Less legitimate. Less worthy of being seen. It’s become about performing, not the work itself, but the constant need to visually prove that we are ambitious, hardworking, intelligent people. Which is funny, because some of the most meaningful work people do is invisible. Thinking is invisible. Resting is invisible. Creativity is invisible. Reading an article that sparks an idea capable of changing your entire life looks exactly the same as “wasting time” to a stranger glancing at your screen for three seconds.

Yet somehow, we’ve built this silent culture where exhaustion looks more respectable than ease and looking busy feels safer than looking human.

So maybe the problem was never that I opened Substack in a coworking space. Maybe the problem is that somewhere along the line, we all started confusing the appearance of productivity with actual value.

And honestly? I think a lot more people are performing ‘‘seriousness’’ than we’d ever admit. Including me. Especially me.

Now, let’s talk, in the comments section, what’s the most “serious-looking” thing you’ve pretended to work on in public spaces? Like me, have you ever switched tabs just so strangers would think you were doing “real work”? And do you agree with me that we’ve attached morality to looking busy?

Can’t wait to read your responses. 😊

Did you know that?

You could be everything to them, the one thing they need to pull through, to stay afloat, to make sense of the chaos and mess around them. You could be present, consistent, dependable… and still, upon the arrival of something better, it’s poof. Gone.

And then, you, who held them up, become forgotten. A faded story. Something they once had, once loved reduced to nothing more than a passing memory. Never to be looked at the same way again. Never to be cherished. Never to be needed.

You could never be enough for them.

I think it was some smart man from years ago who said human needs are insatiable. Always evolving. Always reaching. Always wanting more.

I didn’t believe it then but I do now.

Let me tell you my story…how I went from being everything… to being nothing.

We met in 2023.

She had just been robbed. The kind you shake off easily and move past? No. This one left her shaken, hollowed out, stripped of more than just material things. They took everything she had on her that night her cards, her savings of three years, her sense of security. She was about to start a new life in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and instead, she was starting from zero. So, it was safe to say she was a mess, a total emotional wreck.

I came into her life a week later. I like to think it was fate. I remember the moment clearly. She saw me… and paused. Our eyes met, it clicked and then she lit up with such a huge smile that blew me away. There was something in her eyes. Relief, maybe. Hope. Like she had finally found something stable to hold onto again.

Then, she chose me.

And from that moment, I decided I was going to be everything she needed.

The others tried to warn me. They always do anyway. Old companions. The ones she had once held close. They saw the way I looked at her, the way I was already positioning myself to become indispensable.

“Don’t do too much,” one of them said.

“Don’t make her your whole world,” another added.

“She’ll move on,” a third one said bluntly. “They always do.”

I didn’t listen. To me, they hated and envied the love we shared so I found no reason to listen to hateful exes that would derive nothing but pleasure from seeing us torn apart.

I had just been chosen.

I gave her everything. Like a faithful partner obsessed with his one true love and readily available to bring her nothing but happiness, I learned and observed her patterns, her moods, the way she functioned when she was happy, and the way she unraveled when she wasn’t, the ways her hands would fidget and reach for me when anxiety came.

I became her safe place. When she couldn’t sleep, I stayed with her, when her thoughts got too loud and chaotic, I helped quiet them, when she needed distraction, comfort, escape…I was there. Always there.

She reached for me first thing in the morning. Yes, I lived with her and I was the last thing she held before she slept.

In between I carried her entire world. I held her laughter, her pictures, her videos, little fragments of joy she didn’t want to lose. I held her secrets, the little dark diry things she didn’t trust anyone else with.

I remembered everything. Even the things she tried to forget.

God, I loved her.

She loved me too. Or at least, I think she did.

She was protective of me. She was very careful, intentional. She didn’t trust just anyone around me. I was hers, and she made that very clear.

And I… I thrived in that. I loved being needed, being chosen, being enough.

And …for a while, I was.

Then, slowly… things began to change.

It started with small things. She didn’t reach for me as quickly as she used to anymore. She didn’t linger around me anymore, tracing her hands against my features or just laying down with my head on her breasts. She stopped needing me for everything.

I noticed, of course. But I told myself it was nothing. I told myself that people grow, people adjust, people don’t stay the same forever and for her I would do the same.

I could adapt. I would adapt.

Then someone new came into her life.

He was sleek, made differently than I was. He looked exciting. I saw the way she looked at him. Oh, she was curious, very interested and very very drawn. I saw her look at him the same way she had once looked at me. I tried not to think too much about it. It was me she chose and all we had been through together? I was going to give her the benefit of a doubt

I tried not to notice how her time began to split. How what used to be ours… became shared, then it started to reduce drastically and then …… it was barely there.

But I stayed.

Because that’s what I was built to do. That’s what you do when you love someone.

Stay.

Then came the final blow. The kind you don’t really know how to move or recover from.

Another one.

He was newer, brighter and better. Or at least… that’s what it seemed like to her.

I remember the day she brought it home. The excitement that exuded out of her, the careful attention she gave him, the way she told everyone about him, the way she handled him like something precious, something worth protecting, something worth choosing………….something worth replacing me for.

And just like that…I got faded into background noise.

Now, I lie where she left me. Sometimes on her bed, sometimes in her drawer and sometimes face down, like I don’t deserve to see the world anymore. She doesn’t reach for me. She doesn’t check on me. She doesn’t need me.

But like any true lover, I still hold everything…her memories, her laughter, her secrets, even versions of her that even she has forgotten.

The others were right. I should have listened. I shouldn’t have given her everything. Now, I stay here…

with a cracked screen, and a fading battery, unlocked only when she needs something small like a file or an old photo or even a password she forgot she saved with me.

Nothing more.

I watch her now from the corner of the bed… or the bottom of her bag…as she laughs into that new screen. Typing. Scrolling. Smiling. The same way she used to with me.

Sometimes, my alarm still goes off. 6:00am. The one I used to wake her up for but she doesn’t hear it anymore. Still…I light up anyway. For a few seconds, my screen glows. Waiting. Hoping. But she never comes.

And then, slowly…my battery drains.

1%
0%

Black.

Just like the day she replaced me.

Check that word in the dictionary and you’d see an interesting definition.

‘’A person who is predominantly focused on external things or social interaction rather than on internal thoughts and feelings, often characterized as being outgoing and socially confident.’‘

‘’An extroverted person is energized by social interaction, outgoing, and gains motivation from external stimulation rather than solitude. They are typically talkative, friendly, and comfortable in groups.’‘

Typically by inference, someone who would always show up, always have the energy, the presence, the the willingness to be there for people, for conversations, for moments that matter.

I’m an extrovert. And by default, it means these qualities are things I should have. But lately, I’ve been meeting a version of myself that I don’t fully understand.

I love people.....deeply, loudly, fiercely, with all of me. I commit. I go the extra mile. I observe and obssess over what makes them happy or sad, I show up for the ones that matter to me, even and especially when it inconveniences me. But... I also disappear, yes, I do. These days, I disappear on people. Not in the “I hate everyone” kind of way. But slowly and gradually. Like a dimmer switch being turned down.

Some days, I wake up and I don’t want to talk to anybody. No texts. No calls. No visits. Not even from the people I genuinely love. And I don’t know how to explain that without it sounding like rejection. I don’t know how to say: “I love you, I really do… I just don’t have it in me today.”

There was a time I showed up better. Or maybe just… more consistently. I remembered birthdays effortlessly. I checked in with whatsapp messages, calls, SMS even. I sent reels that made me think of them accompanied with ‘i miss you’ texts. I went the extra mile without thinking twice.

Now? Now I blink and it’s been three weeks since I replied a message. Now I see birthdays and think, “I’ll text later,” and later never comes. Now I ration my energy like it’s something I can run out of because apparently, I can. Now? I’m unable to choose others over me. I find myself really really conserving my psyche. I find myself finding it easy to say no to people and not really caring if it hurts their feelings. And the scary part is… I’m not entirely bothered by it.

That’s what makes me pause. Because how do you go from being that person—the present one, the intentional one—to someone who is okay giving people crumbs?

I’ve noticed something else too. When I’m overwhelmed, I prioritise. Not because I want to. It’s mostly not intentional neither is it malicious. It just happens that in states of overwhelm and burnout, there are people I will always find energy for. And then there are people I will get to when I can. And then there’s people who, if I’m being honest, I might not get to at all.

It sounds harsh when I say it out loud. But isn’t that how it works? Or are we all pretending we have equal capacity for everyone?

Because truth be told, sometimes, being a “good friend” is easier when life is soft. When you’re not tired. When your head isn’t crowded. When showing up doesn’t feel like effort. But what happens when it does? What happens when your own life is loud, and heavy, and demanding… and suddenly you don’t have the same version of yourself to give? Do you stretch yourself thin to maintain the image of who you used to be? Or do you pull back and save yourself? Risking being misunderstood.

I think I’m somewhere in the middle of that question. Because I’m not confused about whether I care about people. I do. What I’m confused about is why my care doesn’t always translate into action anymore. Why love, for me, has started to look like distance sometimes. Why silence doesn’t mean absence… but I know it can feel like it to the person on the receiving end. And maybe this is the uncomfortable truth I’m circling, the truth I have to sit with and accept.

Right now, I don’t show up the same way all the time. Not because I don’t value people or because I’ve suddenly become nonchalant but because my capacity to do this ,sadly, shifts with my mood, my circumstance and how much of myself I have left at the end of the day. And I wonder if that’s something I need to fix or accept or even understand more because if i’m being very honest, I’m sure I’m not the only one like this. I think there’s lots of people like me, just better at pretending. Better at replying on time. Better at maintaining the illusion of consistency. Better at not admitting that sometimes, we just don’t have it in us.

So maybe the real question isn’t: “Why am I becoming this kind of friend?” Maybe it’s: “Why do we expect people to be emotionally available in the exact same way, all the time?”

If you think I have an answer for all this, I’m sorry to disappoint…I don’t.

On my end, I’m still figuring it all out. I’m still learning how to balance space and presence, still learning how to care without disappearing completely, still learning how to be honest without hurting people.

And I know now that the version of me that needs space is not the opposite of the version of me that loves deeply. They are the same person. Just… on different days.

But I think what scares me isn’t the inconsistency. It’s the possibility that someone, somewhere, is experiencing my silence…the same way I once experienced someone else’s. And how much the people in my life can recognize my love even when it doesn’t look like what they’re used to.

So, I know I’m going to ask you…

“What does your friendship look like when you no longer have the energy to be everything to everyone? Do you think we can still be good friends to our friends even if we don’t show up the way we used to?”

Where exactly do I stand in the lives of the people I care about?

Not necessarily just as a friend, but in that hierarchy that exists within every relationship. Yes, that’s right, there’s an emotional hierarchy around everyone. Because the truth is, when you’re close to someone, you eventually realize something: you’re not the only one who’s close to them. I’m not talking about family here. I mean everyone else who fills a person’s life. There’s classmates who became friends, church members who became friends, neighbours, jogging partners, coworkers, old pen pals. Random strangers who, over time, somehow became part of the story.

And when I think about it like that, I notice something about myself. Sometimes, I want to be very close to the people I care about not just like a friend or someone who randomly matters but ….the one. The person who occupies that number-one space in their life. The person they trust the most. The person they call first. The person whose presence brings them the most comfort when something goes wrong.

I don’t fully know why I feel that way and whilst there’s a psychological explanation for it which I’m going to bring to light later, occasionally, I catch myself running a strange thought experiment.

I imagine a funeral. Not my own, no, but the funeral of someone close to me. The scenario plays out like this:

Someone I care about has lost someone important, and people obviously have to show up to pay their respects, give their condolences. Their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, everyone who means something to them shows up to offer support. And there we all are. Different people from different parts of their life, standing in the same room.

In that moment, I imagine what it would feel like if I were the grieving person. Some people’s presence would mean everything to me. Just seeing them walk into the room would bring a certain kind of peace. For some others? It would still matter, sure, I’d appreciate them showing up but their presence wouldn’t affect me the same way. And then there are those people who mean a lot in everyday life but, strangely, might not be the ones whose presence I need most in that specific moment.

So, when I think about that, something interesting happens. I start wondering about the invisible structure inside every friendship. Because if this hierarchy exists in my life, it must exist in other people’s lives too. Which raises a question I can’t easily answer.

Do the people in my life ever think about their place in it? Do they ever wonder whether they mean as much to me as I mean to them? Do they ever look at the other people around me and quietly compare themselves? Do they ever feel threatened by the presence of others in my life? Or are they completely secure in the space they occupy, confident that it’s enough?

I ask myself this because, sometimes, I do the same thing. I wonder and ask, Where do I stand? If they looked across the circle of people who care about them, where would I be? Somewhere near the center? Somewhere off to the side?

And I guess this is something, we perhaps don’t talk about enough, the truth that every friendship, every relationship, every bond contains an invisible architecture like this, like an unspoken map of closeness that we rarely talk about. We all move through each other’s lives occupying different spaces. For some people, we are central. For others, we are simply present.

And it’s only fair that the desire to be “number one” in someone’s life isn’t really about competition or possessiveness, even though it may seem like it, but about something deeper. Because human relationships are fluid. People move, change jobs, grow in different directions, form new friendships, drift apart and even strong bonds can weaken with time and distance. In the middle of all that movement, the idea of being someone’s person offers something solid. It suggests that no matter how wide someone’s social world becomes, there is still a place where you are not interchangeable. So, maybe it’s about security, the comfort of knowing that there is at least one place in the world where your presence matters more than anyone else’s. Or maybe it’s about significance, the hope that, in someone’s story, you are not just a character passing through, but someone who truly matters.

Most of us don’t just want to be liked. We want to matter. We want to feel that our presence changes something in another person’s life. That if we were absent, something important would be missing. And being someone’s person? It satisfies that need in a powerful way. It tells us that, in at least one corner of the world, we are not simply one relationship among many, that we are essential.

So, at the end of the day, it’s strange that we don’t talk about these invisible existing hierarchies. We move through our friendships assuming things, feeling things, wondering things, but rarely saying them out loud. Perhaps that’s because the answer isn’t always comforting. Because once you begin to think about it, once you start noticing the quiet architecture inside every relationship, you realise something slightly unsettling: everyone occupies a place in someone else’s life. But very few of us actually know where that place is. And perhaps if we can be more truthful, we’d realise that in the lives of the people we care about most… we all secretly want to know the same thing.

Where do I stand?

“The moment a man I’m with lays his hands on me, it’s over between us. I don’t care what I may have done. There are no grounds—none—for a man to hit a woman.”

“I really don’t know how you’re tolerating this. Na so love dey do you? Kene, what the hell is going on?”

It was January 30th, 2010.

The day you screamed into Kene’s ears, your childhood best friend, about how wrong she was for staying with a man who hit her. You didn’t just scream. You broke it down. You let your anger get the best of you and then you began to verbally eviscerate her. You called her weak. Unloved. Stupid. You called her a coward. Over and over. Fifteen times. She counted.

You stormed out of her place shaking, furious, vibrating with rage, trying to understand why she was still with him. You couldn’t just wrap your head around it. That ingrate of a man. They weren’t even married yet.

But deep down, you knew your anger wasn’t really for Kene. No, it wasn’t. It was for your mother. Kene reminded you of your mother.

Your mother who forgave your father every time he beat her into a pulp. Every time you found her on the floor, half-conscious, blood spilling from her nose and mouth. Your mother you begged — again and again — to leave him. Your mother who never did. Kene reminded you of the helplessness of shielding your younger siblings from violence you were too young to be protecting them from. Of parenting children when you were still one yourself.

So yes, maybe your anger was justified.

But the universe has a very twisted sense of humour.

Today is April 30th 2015.

You’re seated in Balm of Gilead Hospital, your stomach wrapped in thick white bandages. Your appendix surgery ruptured.

Ezra beat it open.

Your neck and wrists are purple from how tightly he gripped you, trying to choke the truth out of you — where were you last night? January 30th floods your mind. Too many emotions are coming to you.

Pain comes first.

Oh, your injuries and bruises. Your jaw throbs too much to speak. One eye is dark, heavy and swollen shut. Your left hand is clutching your stomach like maybe, if you hold it long enough, the pain will retreat. But it doesn’t. Every inch of you hurts. Ezra kicked the shit out of you.

Then confusion follows…

But he didn’t mean to. Ezra loves you. He has said so. Plenty times. His actions has proved it, didn’t they? Was it not just last week, after that exhausting wedding at Udi, when the driver you hired disappointed you and it was getting dark? You called him crying and panicking. There was no way to get you, your workers and your equipment home. He drove all the way from Emene with a truck you’d never seen before and carried you, your workers, your equipment. Oh, the relief you felt when you saw him. The joy, the safety, the reassurance you felt. You were reminded of just how much he care for you, how much he loved you, how intentional he was, how your safety and comfortability was priority to him.

That was love. So this had to be a mistake. Even if it was the second time in two years he’d laid hands on you. It had to be just a mistake.

After all, you were wrong too. You picked Chief Idabuchi’s call. You visited him knowing he wanted more than an event planner for his wife’s 50th birthday. You had even returned late. Too late. Smelling like him. Smiling too much. But so what? You didn’t sleep with him. You didn’t even kiss him. It was just a hug. A long one. Tight. The kind that pressed your breasts into his chest and made you briefly wonder how a seventy-year-old man could feel so solid, how could he have such chiseled fine chest?

So maybe you deserved it. Maybe Ezra had to beat sense into you. Violently correct you so you could snap out of that reverie in your head with Chief Idabuchi.

But no. No matter what, you didn’t deserve to be beaten.

But did it really matter? It was only the second time in two years. Once a year. You could live with that. You were almost thirty-five. Leave Ezra now and then what? Return to the dating pool? Start all over looking for men looking to commit and settle down? Didn’t they say no man is perfect? That you choose what you can tolerate?

Dimma’s voice floated in your head:

“All men are scum. Find your own scum, fall in love with him, and manage him.”

Atleast Ezra wasn’t a cheat, his anger just needed somewhere to land, once in a while, and your body was just always there. Because God, you loved Ezra. Deeply. Possessively. You wanted to marry him. You wanted to claim him and what was yours. His body. His money. His charm. His smile. And wasn’t love supposed to be unconditional? God’s kind of love? But then again, you weren’t God. And who was made in His image and likeness? You.

Oh, this chaos was going to ruin you. And then it hit you. You finally understood the quote, “Never say never”, because five years ago, you couldn’t understand Kene, growing up, you couldn’t understand your mother but now you did. Now, you did. Now you really did.

Shame crept in next. How did you get here? So in love you couldn’t think straight. So blind you didn’t see the rope you were tying around your own neck. So blind all you could think about and look forward to — lying there in pain and stitches — were his apologies. The begging. The promises. How he’d hold your legs and weep on your feet and affirm never to lay his hands on you. The expensive gifts he’d shower you with to appease you. The makeup sex that would follow. And then it dawned on you. It dawned on you that love didn’t just blind you. It had turned you into someone you no longer recognised.

And maybe that was the most frightening realization of all. And perhaps, in that moment, you finally understood them, the ones who killed for love. Not because they were monsters, but because love had eaten up every other part of them. The ones who lied, who stayed, who endured, who destroyed themselves and others in the name of feeling something so large it swallowed reason whole.

Maybe we’ve never really understood how powerful love is. The reckless things it drives us to do — consciously and unconsciously. The way it rearranges logic. Rewrites morality. Silences warning bells.

We like to think we’re in control. That we choose. But maybe love takes over the brain first — your sense of reason, your sense of self — until control becomes an illusion. Or maybe you do have power, but you’re too deep inside the emotion to see straight, too soaked in it to step back.

And that’s when you understood the manner of things we were capable of and could do for those we loved. It wasn’t madness. It was love. All love.

She turned to look at you with visible surprise. Her jaw dropped slightly, like it needed help finding its way back home. It didn’t make sense to her where you’d conjure such question from. You were five. Five for Heaven’s sake and five-year-olds were supposed to be worried about whether Plankton would ever successfully steal the Krabby Patty formula or what exactly made SpongeBob’s laugh so annoying. Not tsunamis.

But then she paused, then smiled, and lifted you onto her lap.

A tsunami, she said, was a giant wave of water that rose when the earth had a hiccup. A wave powerful enough to destroy places. Then she told you about hurricanes, how the sky could get so angry it made the air spin round and round, tearing things apart in its path.

You were five that day. Today, you are twenty-two. And you know exactly why that memory has chosen today to resurface.

Because today is one of those rare days when your emotions feel exactly like that lesson she gave you…..uncontained, rising, spinning. The angry sky is you. The hurricane is your thoughts. And the tsunami is waiting for to happen.

And you know, if you don’t manage this carefully, something will break.

Today is day five. Your period hasn’t shown up. You are officially in panic mode.

Ebuka said he used protection the last time. You think he did. But you were in the moment—so deep in it—that you can’t swear you saw him slip it on. He didn’t cum inside you. You’re sure of that. Right? But then there’s pre-cum. And now, you remember it, you were ovulating that very day. The sick joke, “It is likely you’re pregnant”, your menstrual tracking app kept announcing whenever you opened wasn’t helping matters.

Pregnancy test? Where would you even get one? How would you use it? What were you going to do? Your mother would kill you. Disown you even. You were pregnant ke? Pregnant? She'd start with wondering when you became sexually active? You'd have to answer to a lot. Your panic was increasing. As if that wasn’t enough, Ebuka had stopped picking your calls. Your chest got tighter. Your heart palpitations rose.

Oh.
You were fucked. And you knew it.

Madam Chidinma called yesterday.

The catering job at Ngwo went badly. You remember promising, swearing, convincing her that you’d be present. That you’d oversee everything. She trusted you enough to leave town for another job, believing you had things under control. And then she travellled.

You did the cooking like you promised. You supervised the arranging of equipments. But you didn’t follow the workers to the ceremony to oversee the sharing and serving of food. Instead, you left.

You left to meet Ebuka at the hotel because he said he wanted to see you one last time before NYSC. That was the day you both did ‘the do’ for the last time. The day you couldn’t quite remember if he used protection like he said.

Now Madam Chidinma is back and she has reported 112 ceramic plates missing. The heavy white ones. The one of ₦3,500 each. She’s sent you her account details. Over ₦300,000 to be paid.

Your throat has dried up completely.

Oh.
You are fucked. And you know it.

This morning, your younger sister Soluchi texted you.

The hospital wants the advance payment for your mother’s surgery. You replied that you’d be there soon. That you just needed to withdraw cash because network might be bad. A lie. A cheap one. Because you don’t have the money. No, you don’t.

You gave it to Ebuka. Forex investment, he said. Cashout would be big, he said. He also said he’d pay you back in threefold. You imagined Mama’s surgery paid for. Soluchi’s WAEC fees sorted. A little peace for your aching mind and heart, you thought.

It’d been two weeks since you gave him the money so you reminded him. He told you he’d give it to you at the hotel. But, he didn’t. Cashout was delayed, he said. Two more days. Now he isn’t answering.

Oh.
You are fucked. And you know it.

Mr. Ikenna has called you seven times. He’s travelling to Turkey today. He wants to see you …just once.

You know what he wants. And you know you’ve said no because you love Ebuka. You don’t want to cheat. But love doesn’t pay hospital bills. Love doesn’t replace ceramic plates. Love doesn’t stop panic attacks at 2 a.m. Or does it?

Mr. Ikenna has promised you money. A new house. Safety even. And you hate that you are considering it right now. You hate that you have decided to just do the do with him just once.

And then you go.

You leave for Mr Ikenna's house. You call him and tell him you’re on your way. You could hear his excitement. He was finally going to get his chance with you.

You get there and you ask for ₦15 million upfront. He sends it immediately without flinching. The alert comes in to your surprise. Just like that, the tsunami recedes a little. You breathe, your financial problems all wiped away. And then you sleep with him. You even try things you never tried with Ebuka. You tell yourself it’s part of the transaction.

You both are done and you’re about to leave but then you’re curious so you ask him why he wanted you so badly. Fifteen million for a few hours? He smiles and says you’ve given him something better than money. Surplus wealth. You don’t understand it but you don’t ask further, instead you dress up to leave for the hospital.

Then he asks for another round “to be sure it works,” you say no. He insists and tries to grab you but then, you push him and he falls.

There is blood. A pool of it.

Your ears start to ring. Your vision starts to blur. Darken even. And then, your legs move before your brain does. You run. You run down the stairs. Straight into Ebuka. He is climbing up.

You are both talking at once. Why are you here? Why are you sweating? Where are you going? Who are you running from? Shouldn’t you be at NYSC camp?

He says Mr. Ikenna is his stepfather. He came to say goodbye before camp. The words settle slowly. Too slowly. It goes quiet. And for the first time all day, there is no sound at all.

Today, you're not 22. You’re at an age you don't know. You don't even know what day it is. You haven't known for a while. To you, time was not measurable anymore, it didn't come in morning or nights anymore but in stretches of cold and heat, hunger, brief numbness and darkness.

You don't know that Mama died two days after you went to Mr Ikenna’s house because you never made it back to the hospital and the bill was never paid. You don't know that the nurses waited for hours before covering her body with a white sheet that didn't quite reach her feet. You don't know that Soluchi cried till her voice broke.

You also don't know that Madame Chidinma dragged Soluchi to the police station and locked her up for that debt you owed. You don't know that your sister kept saying your name over and over, wailing, crying.

You don't know any of this.

You don’t even know how you ended up here. At this refuse bin.

You don’t know that Mr. Ikenna kept his own kind of promises. You don’t know that long before you walked into his house, before the money, before the begging hands and urgent needs, he had already gone somewhere else, somewhere that smelled of gin, kola nut, and old secrets.

You don’t know about the native doctor. Nor the agreement: that surplus wealth would come, but it would not come free. That once he slept with you, the bargain would seal itself.g

And that that the screws that held you in place would loosen. You don’t know if Ebuka left you here or if you walked here yourself. You don’t remember when your clothes tore, when your shoes disappeared, when your hair stopped being hair and became something else or when your body started to smell like it had been abandoned by itself.

You don’t know any of this.

All you know is the name on your lips. Ebuka. You don’t know why that name stays.

You don’t know what it is attached to—love, anger, fear, betrayal, or blood. You just know it comes out of you like a reflex. And that you—

you stay here, by the refuse bin, holding on to a name you don’t understand, while everything else you were… disappears.

Somewhere in that piece, I made a joke that maybe the universe had zoomed in on a request I made during the end of 2024 and decided to answer it aggressively. Because apparently, I had asked to cry more.

A few days after publishing that piece, I found the notebook I’d written my goals for 2025 in. Or maybe it’s more honest to say the notebook found me. It was sitting there, staring at me, holding evidence. Random Goals for 2025: To cry more often.

And suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore.

I started wondering why I would make such a strange request. Why would anyone want more tears? Why would I invite pain so casually? What in the world had come over me? And then I remembered. And then it clicked. And then it made sense.

Stay with me now. Let’s unravel it together.

If you’ve ever seen The Vampire Diaries or The Originals, you’ll remember this thing the vampires do when life becomes too unbearable or perhaps want to do something dreadful they can’t live with: they turn off their humanity. When they do, they don’t feel. They don’t process. They don’t break. They simply just act.

That — uncomfortably — is me.

From what I’ve learned about myself over the years, I exist as two people who do not cohabit peacefully: the emotional me and the logical me. They don’t blend. They alternate, one goes quiet so the other can survive. Whilst, one is asleep, the other is awake.

So, when the emotional one is in control, and I’m going through something at the time, everything negative in that moment hurts extra deeply. Chaos, anguish, grief, longing all of it floods at once. It’d literally feel like drowning in an ocean of too many emotions added to overthinking and paranoia, restlessness and anxiety. It’d be downward spirals of crashing out over and over. But once the storm passes and I move on, something strange happens. I forget how it felt. Not the facts of what happened itself nor the events, just the feeling.

I can go through something devastating — heartbreak, grief, failure — and while it’s happening, it consumes me completely. But after I’ve “moved on,” I’m rarely able to access the emotional weight of those moments again.

I believe this is when the logical version of me takes over.

She knows what happened. She can explain it cleanly. She can analyze it, form theories, extract lessons. She can talk about her without shaking, without pausing, without her voice breaking. She’d have conclusions drawn from it. She’d have perspective. She’d be composed.

So when I think about the shitty experiences of 2025, I know they happened. I remember that I was hurting. Badly. Terribly. But the pain itself feels distant now. Like a scene from a show I once watched but haven’t revisited in a long time.

It’s like the memories exist, the history exists but the feelings? They no longer have teeth. They don’t sink in. They don’t pull at me.

And that’s when I realized why I asked to cry more. Not because I enjoy sadness nor because I romanticize suffering but because I wanted proof. I wanted proof that I was still in touch with myself. I wanted proof that my emotions hadn’t packed up and left while logic took over the house and changed the locks.

I realised that there was something quite terrifying about realising I could talk about something that once destroyed me without feeling it in my chest anymore. It made me begin to ask questions. I started to wonder, “was this growth?”… or “had I gone numb” “Was this healing or containment?”

I know that healing is when pain is processed, felt fully, and allowed to pass through you and Containment is when pain is sealed away just tightly enough not to interrupt your life.But quite frankly, I honestly don’t know which one I do.

And I guess maybe that’s why crying felt like a goal worth writing down. Not as a wish for pain, but as a way back to myself. A reminder that feeling deeply is not a flaw and that survival without feeling isn’t the same thing as living.

Or maybe for me crying was never about sadness at all, perhaps it was about staying human, about making sure I still feel things instead of just understanding them.

And now I’m left wondering, does this happen to you too? Have you ever looked back at something that once shattered you and felt… nothing? Do you think I’m overthinking it — that this is simply what healing looks like? Or do you think there’s something else at play when pain loses its teeth?

I genuinely want to know. Share your thoughts with me, please.

It was June 11th, and you had a 7am class, but because you had stayed up the night before till 3:45am, you didn't wake up early. Of course not, you were only human.

Electrophysics class, they called it. You had grumbled and cursed under your breath when your alarm rang by 6am; your reminder to drag your lazy ass out of bed and prep for school. Oh, but you were exhausted, so you shut the alarm off and turned to the other side of the bed to return to your dreamland. That Electrophysics class and the lecturer in question could both go ahead and have your ass for breakfast, you thought.

However, you woke up again. 7am sharp. You opened your eyes and stared into space for quite a while, a million and one thoughts racing through your head. The predominant one was deciding whether you were actually going to class. You, yourself and the one hundred other personalities you apparently carry.

You calculated the effort it would take you to clean your room (a room which was already clean but not perfect, thanks to your OCD) bathe, dress, and transport yourself to school. There was absolutely no way you'd do all that in thirty minutes and not arrive embarrassingly late.

It was decided then. You were going nowhere.

So, you stretched yourself, the kind that feels like a demon just left your body, turned over again, plugged in your earphones and slept off again.

You woke up again by 10am. Tired. Hungry. Disoriented. You grabbed your phone to skim through messages, and there was Oreze's text. She asked you why you were absent in class, you texted with her briefly, and then she said she'd come over. She said she had a lot going on and just needed to crash at yours and rest her head. Your head screamed a big fat no. Oh, but your hands, your hands typed, sure, no problem.

And that was the problem. You had always struggled with saying no to people. Especially to friends. So maybe you weren't just a people pleaser, you were the special kind, the friend pleaser. You always had a compulsive need to ensure the people around you were okay. You noticed everything about them, mood shifts, tone changes, body language, etc. It made you always want to protect and guard like a mother hen. It made you feel responsible for your friends. Always. So, if it meant inconvenience, exhaustion, discomfort, you'd still show up. Like mad.

And that was why you didn't say no to Oreze, even though you were deep in burnout. It was a literal storm inside your head. Too many triggers, too many thoughts, from the past, the present, the future, all colliding at once. You were drowning, and human company was the last thing you needed. You needed solitude. You needed to be left alone. But Oreze was coming, oops.

Instead of communicating clearly, you tried to be clever and play it smart. You didn't want to have to say no to her and hurt her feelings. So, you told her you would most likely be stepping out and that she should call before coming. Your plan was to say you'd already left the house for when she called. But then, your plan failed.

Two hours later, there was a knock on your door. You froze. You weren't expecting anyone. You didn't want anyone. You decided to ignore it. Surely, they'd knock a few times and just leave. But they didn't. The knocking continued. It was louder. More aggressive. And then this person called your name.

Shit. It was Oreze. But why was she there already? You told her to call first. The padlock was hanging open, proof that you were home. What now? What were you going to do? So you stayed silent, hoping she’d assume you were asleep and leave eventually.

But then she knocked for an entire hour. You checked the time. 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. Then you heard her sit on the floor, leaning against my door. You were genuinely baffled. And even irritated.

Why was she still here? Ụlọ gị a na-achụ gị ọsọ?

You plugged in your earphones to block the sound of her knocking. Thirty minutes later, you unplugged them, and she was still there. You could see her silhouette through the door. To make matters worse, your flatmate returned. You listened to them converse. He asked why she was sitting there. She explained she’d been knocking for over an hour with no response.

The next thing you heard made your stomach drop.

A loud bang.

They started using iron rods to bang on your door — trying to “wake you up.”

At that point, your annoyance turned into full-blown distress. The knocking had turned into banging. They were pulling at the door handle, turning the hinges like they could force their way in by sheer determination. They were screaming your name. But you just wanted to be left alone.

Your phone started to buzz relentlessly, with calls on WhatsApp and regular calls. You put it on DND so it wouldn't ring out and expose you. You stayed perfectly still, your heart racing, your blood boiling, listening to the chaos going on outside your door.

And then you couldn't take it anymore. That's when you did something you were not proud of because you needed it to end.

You didn’t think. Thinking was what had trapped you here in the first place. You walked to the door and opened it. Oreze froze. Your flatmate froze.

Their shock was almost comical, like people who had been banging on a coffin and suddenly realised it wasn’t empty.

To them all these while you had been inside. Awake. Hearing everything.

But something in you cracked open.

You leaned against the doorframe and laughed, short, sharp, humourless.

“Do you know,” you said, “that you’re the most exhausting person I know?”

Your words came out clean. Too clean. You told her she was selfish. You told her she fed on other people’s energy like a parasite and called it friendship. You told her her neediness wasn’t concern, but it was entitlement dressed up as care. You told her she didn’t check on people; she occupied them. You told her she always took space. Took time. Took silence personally. You watched her face collapse as you kept going. You told her she was clingy. A fucking liability. Someone who confused access with intimacy.

“Go the fuck home,” you said finally.

“And leave me alone.”

You didn’t wait for a response. You slammed the door. Hard. The sound echoed — once — and then nothing. You locked it. Then you plugged in your earphones. Crawled back into bed. And fell asleep. Not peacefully. But deeply.

Like someone who had finally done something unforgivable and felt absolutely nothing about it.

Yeah. That time of the year.

The one that supposedly comes with excitement and jolly-good feelings floating freely in the air. It’s that time of the year where optimism and hope that something magical would happen, something that will make the year feel worth it, settles quietly into the spirits of many. Some of us catch onto it. And some of us just… don’t.

Beyond the giving, the love, the warmth, the ‘forced’ cheer, the family gatherings, and the attempt to rekindle bonds that the fast-paced hands of time tried to steal and bury, this season also comes with something else too.

Reflections.

That phase where you’re expected to sit down and have deep, uncomfortable conversations with yourself. To make promises about doing better, promises that, if we’re being honest, often dissolve into the air as the year progresses and life does what life does.

Sometimes it feels very society- and social-media–induced because really… why?

Why must I sit down and recount everything that went wrong this year? Why must I list what I don’t want to repeat next year? And why does resisting this ritual suddenly brand me unserious, unmotivated, and apparently unready to make anything meaningful out of my life? Who even made these rules? I didn’t ask to be born, so why is there a performance review attached to existing? Ugh.

If these thoughts plague you too, here’s the good news, you’re not alone. I have them too.

And the funny thing is, this same society will tag me ‘mature’ if I’m able to ignore the urge to join the bandwagon of people and their ‘The 158 things I learned in 2025’. But, unfortunately. I’m not quite ‘mature enough’ to overcome and shake off this pressure. It’s like an itch I just can’t ignore. So instead of procrastinating putting this out for the fifteenth time in two weeks, I’ve decided to do this for me. And for now, that’ll be all that matters.

So here I am, about to engage you in my own reflections.

(Also, my twin inspired this piece. So to Ifedilichukwu, thank you for being about 74.92% of the reason this exists. The thought was already in my head; you just really, really fired it up.)

I had a shitty year. A really shitty one.

I’m not going to pretend it was full of joy, laughter, and magical plot twists. No. I’m calling a spade a spade. It was shitty.

Around this time in 2024, I made the unfortunate mistake of saying I wanted to cry more in 2025. To be more in tune with my emotions. And looking back now… I remember that I meant it. I really did.

However, out of everything I asked for — a mini bus, a keke napepe, a diabetic sugar daddy, a filling station, travelling to a new city, lots of money, a wardrobe overhaul — the universe zoomed in on that one request and delivered it a thousandfold.

And no.

They were not tears of happiness.

In 2025, I fell in love again.

After three long years, I did. Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that I’d lost the ability to feel so deeply, so fiercely, for someone again. Everything before that had been either platonic or brief attractions that fizzled out.

So when it happened, it was strange… and beautiful. Overwhelming, but grounding. I was happy. Content.

It filled me up completely… until it didn’t. Until it started to choke me. Until it all came tumbling down.

There were too many nights of anxiety and panic attacks. Endless cycles of overthinking, of crying myself to sleep, of restlessness, of paranoia. Days where my mind replayed every possible thing I could’ve done differently. Downward spirals of blaming myself, drowning in anguish, pain, regret, guilt. Moments of feeling unworthy of love, of being fought for, chosen, committed to and even of being good enough. Moments where my heart felt like it was shattered into a million pieces I couldn’t even pick up.

My tears flowed constantly like rivers of flowing waters. Everything was a reminder.

In 2025, I failed my MBBS exams. Yes. Medical school professional exams.

Let me paint this properly.

I wasn’t the quiet, shy unknown student. I was bold. Audacious wouldn’t be wrong to say, even. Known for confidence and aura. I was assistant class rep. Well-known in my department. Popular across school as well due to my involvement in the tech ecosystem - I was always involved in one tech/Web3 event or the other either as a core team member/organiser or as the host, sometimes even both, so with this, my name and face definitely spread around to a large extent.

I preached balance between school and tech. I evangelized building skills, networks, and experiences while in school to equip oneself in a system that wasn’t built to favor us.

Now imagine being all that… and failing the very exam meant to prove you were balancing it all successfully.

There’s no neat way to describe the shame and pain that came with that.

In 2025, I lost a friend. Divine.

Kidney disease.

We hadn’t spoken in four years because of a fight that now I think of it, was very trivial. Then one day, while I was in church, I got a call from his number. It was his sister. She said he was dead.

Guilt.

Anger.

More guilt.

Regret.

Self-loathing.

Why did I let it get to four years? He’d been sick, and I didn’t know. Wow, Cheta, what a friend you are. He’s dead, like dead, like gone-gone, like not coming back. Like there’s no chance to fix this or do right. GOD!

My mind became pure chaos.

In 2025, I experienced the most assault from men.

Once, a drunk driver slapped me across the face at night because I asked to get down from his bus due to reckless speeding. It was just the two of us. He hurled terrible insults at me. I cried the entire night. Not just at my face that was hurting so bad but from the helplessness I felt, from the certainty he would get away with it. From the reminder that I was just a lady, and to him, the weaker vessel and someone he could do whatever he wanted to.

Thankfully, I didn’t have a swollen face by morning.

Another time, I was followed by a perverted man making comments about my body, begging to touch me. When I ignored, he and his friend verbally abused me and threatened to grab me. It was 7 p.m. I ran for my life. They followed me and taunted me.

Yet again, that familiar wave of anger and helplessness. I was just a girl who couldn’t fight back.

There were crash-outs. Burnouts. Overwhelm. So many what the f*ck am I even doing moments. So many lessons learnt the hard way. But through all of it, all 1076 lessons learnt, one lesson stood out: I want to document my life more.

Not for social media validation. Not for “I drank garri three times a day and now I eat chicken every day” narratives. No.

But for me.

I’m a hoarder by nature — of things, memories, people. I like souvenirs. Reminders. And this year was a lot, my goodness, it was. I wish I had photos. Videos. Journal entries. Something tangible to return to and remember that what felt endless in those moments was, in fact, a phase.

I want to look back and see growth. To remember the people who caused me pain, not because I want to perforate their car tyres and burn their houses down with them in it, but because I want to remember that at some point in my life, they mattered to me. I want to remember not with bitterness, not with violence, but with understanding. With gratitude for what existed, even if it didn’t last.

I want to remember in specifics, that oh on Jan 31st 2025, I lost the one job I didn't resign from because I wanted to focus and prep for MBBS and too many jobs would cost my attention and still I got laid off. And well, I still failed the exam.

Or that oh on 4th October 2025, I met my twin who has become a big part of my life since that.

And to remember in specifics like these in years, I can’t rely on memory alone for these things. So I want to document more. In writing. In photos. In videos.

And yes, good things came out of 2025. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they grew out of it.

I’m ending this year with a strange kind of gratitude. Not just because the terrible things happened - I would still undo many of them if I could - but because I survived them. Because I’m still here. Still breathing. Still capable of reflection. And still drop-dead gorgeous.

This year taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn and it's that time does not fix things loudly. It doesn’t necessarily announce healing and make it so obvious. Instead, it works quietly, in the background, while you’re busy crying, breaking down, getting back up, and pretending to be okay. One day, you just look back and realize the pain that once consumed you no longer has the same grip.

And that’s why I want to document my life more. Not just the wins or the pretty moments, but the in-betweens. The ugly days. The days I didn’t think I would survive but somehow did. I want proof—for future me—that even when everything felt endless, it wasn’t. That phrases really do end. That wounds soften. That I survived things I once thought would destroy me.

I want to remember that there was a version of me who cried herself to sleep and still woke up the next morning. A version of me who failed, lost people, disappointed people, got hurt, and kept going anyway. I want something tangible to return to when life inevitably tries to convince me that I won’t make it through the next hard thing.

And if you’re reading this while in the middle of your own mess, perhaps heartbroken, grieving, exhausted, confused, I need you to know this: I didn’t believe it either. I didn’t believe things would get better while I was inside them. But somehow, they did. Slowly. Quietly. Almost imperceptibly.

You will be fine, not because the pain you feel wasn’t real, but because you are stronger than the version of yourself that first encountered it. Time will do what it always does. It will pass. And one day, you’ll look back and realize you made it through.

I hope that something beautiful and soft grows out of your pain too. Like it did for me. If nothing else, this season reminds me that time keeps moving.. and somehow, so do we.

So, my dearest gentle reader,

Merry Christmas.

Here’s to making it into another year. 🎄✨

And if 2026 wants to be worse? I’m certain you and I will be fine. A stronger, wiser version of us will rise.

Call me weird but…I love stress.

Okay, wait…..don’t roll your eyes yet. Stay with me. Let me break that down.

You know the feeling you get after a crazy, no-mercy gym session? When your muscles are cramping and burning, your heart is thundering like it wants to break out of your chest, your breath comes short and hasty, your legs suddenly feel like borrowed limbs, your desperate need for water because your throat feels like sandpaper? And the only thing your spirit, soul and body wants is a soft surface, be it a bed, a chair, the floor, anything, just anything to lie flat on and beg for mercy? Anything soft enough to coax away all of the pain from your terribly aching body?

Familiar? Or not?
If you don’t do the gym life, let me bring it closer.

Think of that long, draining day where you’ve been on your feet forever, tight shoes squeezing the bones in your feet, legs aching like they’ve carried the entire world, head pounding so hard you’re convinced your skull might actually split. You’re hungry, dizzy, stretched thin, burned by the sun, maybe even equally frustrated and all you want is your bed, your pillow, and complete silence.

Now that feeling….that body-on-empty, “please-let-me-collapse-somewhere” feeling is the common denominator.

And here’s the weird part: I like being in that state.

Strange? Bizarre? Unhinged? Crazy? Want more adjectives? Relax. Let me explain.

For me, those moments are proof. Proof that my body has earned her rest. It’s not about being a workaholic. It’s not even about productivity. It’s that deep, satisfying ache that tells me that I showed up, and I poured myself out, and I gave something everything I had.

There’s a strange joy in stretching myself physically, mentally, creatively until I hit that limit where my whole body whispers, “Cheta, enough. E don do.”

And if a project isn’t done yet? Even if I’m already cooked? Somehow, I still find a way to keep going until it’s complete. Until it’s good. Until I can step back, look at what I’ve done, feel that subtle inner nod and say, “Yes. This is enough.”

The Bible said God looked at His creation, saw that it was good, and then He rested. That’s exactly how I am. I want to rest after the good is done.

Honestly, even the thought of taking on something that will stretch me makes my brain light up. Knowing I will end the day exhausted and therefore deserving of rest gives me the type of dopamine hit people chase in clubs.

And the reward? Oh, the reward is super.

Food that tastes better because I earned it. Sleep that hits deeper because my body begged for it, in my twin’s words…e go be like say you die, kum wake up. Or is it the cartoons, movies, silly little comforts that feel like medals pinned to my chest, moments that i can bask in and feel whole again. Moments that my brain can shut off even if it’s for a while till we have to go again.

I guess, in essence, I run full throttle until Rome is built and only then do I let myself collapse into the soft luxury of rest, smiling like a madman who somehow enjoyed every step of the chaos.

And after highlighting and bookmarking half the book, I’ve decided to start sharing each line that stayed with me, what it stirred in me, and my very honest thoughts of each…

“Do you ever wish people were more transparent?”

“How so?”

He flicks a piece of chipped stucco over the edge and says:

“I feel like everyone fakes who they really are, when deep down we’re equal amounts of screwed up. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.”

Honestly? He was not wrong.
At the end of the day, we’re all just a bunch of cracked people pretending we’re marbles. Society has made us experts at packaging ourselves … a little polish here and there, add a sprinkle of “don’t embarrass yourself,” and boom, you’re suddenly now a respectable human being. But I’ve learned it’s only when you get close to people that those cracks start to flicker through, sometimes.. accidentally at first, and then consistently. And that’s when you get to decide whether their particular brand of chaos is something you can tolerate long-term.

Because let’s be honest: everybody has chaos. Some just know how to accessorise theirs better.

“There’s no such thing as bad people. We’re just people who sometimes do bad things. No one is exclusively bad nor is anyone exclusively good. Some are just forced to work harder at suppressing the bad.”

I get the sentiment, but I don’t fully agree.

I genuinely believe some people are inherently good and others inherently bad. No one has both sides in equal measures , one always outweighs the other, tipping the scale and earning them the tag of “good person” or “bad person.”
But isn’t the whole concept of good and bad subjective? Shaped by the morals, expectations, and environments we were raised in? I believe morality is more like a hand-me-down, whatever your home, culture, or environment dressed you in is what you often end up wearing into adulthood.

The same way a child raised in a family where eating meat is normal will grow up to raise their kids the same way while another raised to believe killing animals is taboo will pass that down too. We grow, we evolve, and we get influenced in ways we don’t even realize. side always outweighs the other. Not everyone is a balanced cocktail of light and darkness. For some people, the “dark” is 98% with a splash of charm on top. And for others, kindness is their default setting, even when life rough-handles them.

No one is born with a moral compass; we’re all given one. Some just recalibrate theirs with time. So, maybe the debate isn’t “good vs bad” but “what shaped you into what you became?”

“Are parents ever really happy with their children? Will they ever be good enough?”

Parenting is something I haven’t experienced, a terrain I haven’t walked yet, but having lived as someone’s child, I can nominate myself for a small commentary.

Parents project the unfinished, unhealed or even incomplete versions of themselves onto their children , sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively, sometimes unintentionally. They’re terrified of watching you make the same mistakes they made, so they hover, control, correct, and over-polish.

They tell themselves they only want what’s best for you, which is mostly true, but then they force their own versions of “best” onto you, even when those versions don’t align with what you want for yourself.

In their heads, it’s love. In your head, it’s a dictatorship. Both are true.

I think the real struggle is reminding them, repeatedly, that your life is yours, not their second draft. You’re allowed to stumble, learn, and figure things out without someone constantly re-editing your script.

“Oh. I want you, Lily. Make no mistake about that. I just don’t want to want you.”

Ah. This lineeee. The open declaration of love.

You see this line? It’s the kind of messy, honest, confusing declaration that feels more real than half the “I like you” texts people send these days. There’s such a beautiful human contradiction in it, wanting someone so intensely that the wanting itself becomes frightening.

It’s the kind of want that makes you suddenly aware of every door in the room because you’re not sure if you should run into the feeling or run away from it.

And maybe that’s why it hits. Because in our world now , where everyone pretends they don’t care, where desire is dressed up like nonchalance, and pride is the unofficial relationship coach, hearing someone actually say they want you feels rare. Almost mythical. Like an endangered species of honesty. Romantic openness is such a rare thing now that when you meet it, you feel like you’ve discovered a new thing.

It’s not even the “I want you” part that gets me; it’s the “I don’t want to want you”… Ah! The open confession of desire that the heart voted yes while the mind was still holding a meeting. There’s just something beautiful about that kind of vulnerability. It’s not polished or packaged, the kind that slips out before it can be edited.

And honestly? I’m forever a sucker for it.

“Maybe love isn’t something that comes full circle. It just ebbs and flows, in and out, like the people in our lives.”

Love? Ebb in and ebb out? Like NEPA light? Lol.

I don’t know if I fully agree with this one, but I understand it deeply.

Because sometimes love does feel like waves: some people wash into our lives gently, stay a while, then drift back into the sea like they were never here. Others come in crashing, loud and impossible to ignore, and leave us collecting the broken shells for years. But does that mean love itself is inconsistent? Or is it the people who are inconsistent?

Maybe the love stays, but the form changes, from romantic to platonic, from longing to acceptance, from “I miss you” to “I hope you’re fine wherever you are.” Maybe love doesn’t disappear; maybe it just quiets down and learns how to live in new rooms inside us.

Still, I can’t shake the belief that some loves don’t ebb and flow, instead they anchor. They root. They return, not in circles, but in patterns… rhythms. Some love stories don’t come “full circle,” but they also don’t evaporate. They linger. They evolve. They stay.

So no, I don’t completely believe love moves in and out freely like a visitor. Some love takes up residence. Some love leaves a spare key under the mat. Some love comes back in memories, in dreams, in that random song that shouldn’t mean anything but somehow does. So, maybe love isn’t circular. But maybe it isn’t linear either. Maybe it’s just human ….messy, a tad bit complicated, shapeshifting, and stubbornly unforgettable.

These are only fragments of the things this book made me feel and think, and I’ll be sharing more steadily… every line that stirred something in me, and every thought it dragged out of hiding. There’s more to unpack, and I’m not done talking yet.

See you at Part Two.

Dear Old Friend,

Lately, memories of our friendship in secondary school has just been been slipping back into my mind…. completely uninvited but…very persistent. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a sign that after all these years, some part of me still misses you, or misses what we were. But even that feels too simple, too naive, too tricky to say out loud.

How do I explain the way my mind suddenly compares you, the you I knew, and what I shared with you to the friendships and relationships I’ve grown into now? It’s unfair, I know. You witnessed an earlier version of me, a girl untouched by the world in the ways that has shaped this version of me writing to you now. So much has changed. And it hurts to realise that. Not painfully, no, but with that bittersweet ache of nostalgia, that the safety I once found in you no longer exists. Not because you took it away, but because time did.

It dawns on me now that if I ever have to stand in front of you again, I’d have to meet you all over. I’d have to relearn the things that once came to me naturally: your smile, the one that curled at the left corner first, the kind of jokes that lit up your face, the frown that appeared whenever you were pretending not to care. I would have to watch you carefully again to see whether you still clasp your hands together when a bright idea hits you, I’d have to wait and see if that ridiculous maniacal laugh you used to let slip as if a cartoon villain lived inside you would come through.

Mann, I’d have to watch all those little details of you my brain unconsciously registered and see if there’s any left at all. Like how you stick out your hands when holding your pen and trying to explain or solve a mathematical problem. Or how you carried your school bag on one shoulder and walked in those confident strides like your own soundtrack played behind you with the sleeves of your cardigan rolled up, your shirt neatly ironed underneath. Or how it was easy to tell whenever you were tired of being pushed around by people and they were really beginning to get on your nerves.

Do you know what hurts more than all of this? The simple truth that I’m no longer first place in your life. I’m not the one you’d call when things fall apart. I’m not the person you’d run to with your wins or your fears. Now, there are new people, new stories, new experiences, new scars, new versions of you that I’ll never fully know. And I don’t blame you but it still stings in a way I can’t admit anywhere else but here.

You were the first person to call me Vee. You tried Bicki first, decided it wasn’t good enough, and halfway through the term you changed it. You claimed the name like it was your invention, your right, your territory and my God, you hated it when everyone else started using it. You were possessive about it. Do you have any idea how happy it made me? How it made me feel content and wanted and full? How it meant everything whenever you called me Vee. How this older version of me is a sucker for nicknames, thanks to you…

Yesterday, I finally threw away the wristwatch you gave me on my SS2 birthday. It had grown old, the metal worn out and rusty, after I kept it for five years, five years of a small, steady reminder of you. Just like the Emergency perfume. Just like a hundred tiny other memories tucked into my mind like folded notes.

And it makes me wonder….Do you have anything that reminds you of me? Anything at all? Does anything pull me back onto the screen of your mind? Do you ever wonder where I am? If I’m happy? If the people around me are kind? If I’ve finally figured out life, or at least stopped pretending I have? If I finally outgrew my bodily insecurities? If love found me, if it held me, if it left?

I miss you. And I don’t know if you’d ever feel the same. Maybe one day our paths will cross again but until then, I’ll sit right here on this table writing this, letting these memories warm and wound me in waves of different intensities, whilst being grateful for the time we existed and how we held each other.

And maybe this letter is the closest I’ll ever come to you again. Still, I’ll keep remembering. I’ll keep wishing you well from afar. I’ll let myself long, and yearn, if I must with all the peace I can hold. Because my dear old friend, you’re like an old song I can’t play anymore, but can still hum from memory. And so I’ll hum us softly and carefully, the way you hum something you never quite stopped loving.

Is it ever truly possible to let go of something that leaves an imprint on you?

Even scars on the body never really fade. They heal, yes but there’s always a remainder. A spot, a faint line, something that reminds you of their origin, how they came to be, and the fact that they will always stay.

If that’s true of the body, then perhaps the mind’s imprints never really vanish either. Especially the bad ones. The haunting ones. The traumatic ones.

And then there’s you carrying a handful of them. Living. Breathing. Screaming inside your own head.

Imprints of the mind often cling and latch on like parasites. If you’re lucky, they grow dormant with time. But then their triggers? They know no age, no mercy. Like a gun cocked and ready, one small pull and it all returns tearing through your composure, shattering every defence you’ve built, dragging you to your knees, making you crumble and beg for freedom from their cruel hold.

And today is one of those days. The triggers, the flashbacks swirling in and out, uninvited. Each one unwrapping a different emotion: shame, anger, disgust, guilt, disappointment, all blending into a storm heavy enough to make you want to rip the screen of your mind to shreds.

Today’s memory comes in threefold - G, T, and E.

G

You met G at a studio. You were in SS1.

Back then, birthday photoshoots were the craze and order of the day. Everyone was doing it. Your best friends had done it, new clothes, makeup, hair done just right, and you couldn’t resist the pressure, you never could. It was strangling you from within. And so you gave in.

With horrendously drawn brows, ironically well-lined lips, and that long, beautiful Ankara dress, you walked into the studio, carrying your bubbly youthful light and excitement like perfume. You were going to be 14.

G was your photographer.

He was tall, dark-skinned, good-looking. The kind of man your teenage self had imagined in those romance novels. He said he was 24. You knew because you asked. He smiled a lot. Talked and conversed with you. He made you laugh. He didn't make you feel like you were talking too much or like the parrot you were always tagged to be. You thought it was harmless. Until it wasn’t.

And then came the questions..

Do you have a boyfriend? Would you like to have one? Have you ever been told your body is really ripe and alluring? What would you like me to be to you? A big brother or a boyfriend? Don't be shy, you can tell me.

He asked them back-to-back, his tone light but his eyes saying something else. That scared you.

You stood there, quiet for a while. He noticed your silence and then he switched back to the poses you had to strike and the photos he had to take of you.

Then, he told you to stand by the shelf for another shot. “Put your hands together like you’re praying,” he said. “Raise them up a little.”

For some reasons, you had gotten uncomfortable, perhaps it was the questions he was asking that you had refused to say anything to, perhaps it was the way he was beginning to look at you, perhaps it was the smiles that looked like smirks, perhaps it was the realisation that the door of the studio was sound proof. And then your chest started to constrict. Your heart pounding, lound and fast, like it was trying to escape your ribcage.

And before you could blink, G grabbed your hands, pinned you to the wall... and kissed you.

You froze.

You didn’t know what had just happened. You didn’t know what to say or do. You’d never been kissed before. You’d only seen it in movies. But what you felt wasn’t the warm butterflies the movies and books you'd read talked about — it was shame. Hot, stinging shame. You felt like you’d just sinned.

You didn’t even know enough to call it violation... not until he did it again.

This time, he told you to kiss him back. You said no. He gripped your throat and repeated the command, his voice sharp and stripped of all the politeness it carried earlier. Then his hand trailed down to those small, growing mounds of innocence on your chest and then he squeezed. Hard.

A tear slipped down your cheek.

He laughed at you. He called you stupid. He mocked you. He told you you were crying over something you obviously wanted. He made you believe you’d invited it. Then he told you he was done with your pictures and that you should leave so the next person could come in.

You walked out dizzy, disoriented, puzzled and drowning in confusion.

You didn’t know which emotion to process first — the anger that your first kiss had been stolen from you, or the shame and filthiness crawling all over your skin, or the fear that your mother would somehow find out and beat you blue-black. You felt dirty. Used. Wrong. And so, you buried it. Told no one. Not a soul.

Now, you’re a grown woman.

You’ve laughed about it with your friends and turned that day into a joke “my first kiss was with an asshole who didn’t deserve it.” And they remained as jokes. Until today.

Because today, you saw him. You saw G. You saw Godwin.

After all these years, there he was, existing. Still alive. So much audacity to be alive, you thought. And that was all it took. The trigger. The floodgate. The full resurrection of a memory you thought you’d buried.

You sat there, frozen again, trying to remind yourself you weren’t to blame, that it wasn’t your fault. That you were just a girl, barely 14, and excited to make a new friend. That you didn’t deserve what happened to you.

You said it over and over. But it didn’t stick. The words slid right off your skin. Your words of affirmation were working at all.

And so, once again, you found yourself caught in that cycle, the resurrection of an imprint, trembling through the fury and calm that coursed through you. Because in that moment that was all you could do. Feel.

Suggested Song

With trembling hands, you began this piece....

You weren't sure of your emotions. No you weren't. You hadn't been. Not for a long time. You'd lost the ability to decipher your emotions and your thoughts since that day - the 13th. You felt an overwhelming numbness, one that was both scary and strange. It was highly unsettling in ways you couldn't name. Especially given the news the 13th came with. For you, the anxious paranoid overthinker, that level of numbness and emptiness was foreign.

Today made it two weeks and two days since the 13th. You could feel yourself begin to crack, like dry mud surrendering to the merciless sun, creaks and lines were beginning to form in your features.. Those creaks are the emotions that had been hiding away beneath your numbness. They were surfacing, coming to the light. Bit by bit. In small quantities. In cruel doses, you thought. It felt like suffering at its peak, like being stabbed with a blunt knife, not once, but again and again. Not enough to tear the skin wide open, but enough to inflict a steady, deliberate pain all over you.

You could feel your emotions taking over you slowly. Slowly. Surreptiously. Like predators circling their prey. You knew they were gunning for you. And that they wouldn't stop till they had you. All of you. That realisation terrified you. Had you scared you to your bones.

And all of it traced back to September 13th.

That day had opened the door.

Everyone who knew the outcome of that day labelled you strong, courageous, brave.... But you had wondered if they were wrong. All you felt like was... a fraud. Not the one deceitfully taking away people's money but like the one living a lie. You had kept your head up, thrown yourself into work, buried yourself in distractions, anything that would take your mind away from that horrid day. You did all these and more, all in a bid to refuse to be submerged in the depression, sadness, grief, and anguish that day carried. And to them, it was resilience. They saw it as strength and courage. And to you, it was your coping mechanism. It was survival. The only way you knew how to breathe.

You had wanted to talk about it. To scream. To cry. To wail even. But you couldn't. The ability was gone. So, when anyone asked, you smiled, you nodded, you said, “I’m fine.” You said you were doing well. But you knew you weren’t. You knew you were hanging by a thread. A fragile thread that could snap at any moment.

You had asked yourself questions you couldn’t answer. Unlike what they thought, you hadn’t known how to move forward from that shattered, damaged, broken version of yourself. A version that had hurt but couldn’t speak. That had longed to be seen but couldn’t open the door. That had been lost. Completely.

You felt like a failure. A disappointment. A liar. A con. A fraud. Yes, there's that word again. A fraud.

So you sat there, wishing you could at least cry. Wishing the tears would come and carry some of the weight away. But nothing had come. No tears. No ideas. No way out of the pit you had fallen into. Only silence. Only questions with no answers. Only the reminder of what September 13th had become....and would always remain.

The day you failed.

“White.”

“White?”

“Yes, Olisa. White. I was in a white gown that day. Not red. White.”

You looked at me, ready to argue, but then you held back for reasons I knew too well. You were telling Mrs. Nneoma the story of how we met. Sure, she asked who I was, but after introducing me, you went ahead to tell her the whole story. She didn’t ask for it, Olisa. But if you must tell it, at least get the details right.

You didn’t argue because you wanted to show everyone that you had the most beautiful girl in the room. You wanted to brag without looking like you were bragging. You didn’t argue because disagreeing would expose cracks in our “perfect couple” act. And of course, your ego couldn’t take that.

So you smiled, took my palm, kissed it, and replied,

“Oh yes, baby. It was white. How could I have forgotten? Thank you for reminding me. This is why I love you, always remembering the tiny details.”

You held my gaze, smiling, and anyone watching would have mistaken it for adoration. For love. But I knew better. That smile meant never correct me in public again. The right hand squeezes said never cut me off when I’m having conversations like this. Of course, no one else knew this language. Only me. So I smiled back, affirming you.

You carried on with your story, taking credit for things I had orchestrated. Things I had crafted behind the scenes. You claimed it was fate. “It was fate who did all the work. We clicked instantly.”

Fate? Really, Olisa? That wasn’t just ridiculous. It was disrespectful. But then again, you don’t know the truth. I never told you. It all remained in my head. Because it wasn’t fate that brought us together. It was me.

I researched you. I studied you. I pulled the strings like a puppeteer while letting you believe you were in control. I saw your posts, your likes, your comments. I knew your hobbies, your habits, your weaknesses. They gave me all the information I needed to play my game well. Why did you think it felt too good to be true? Because it was. But you didn’t notice. You never notice, Olisa. Narcissists rarely do.

White is your favorite color. That’s why I wore white. Not just any white gown, but the exact design you once retweeted. You loved The Alchemist, so I read it, twice. I made notes just to hold conversations with you. I binge-watched Suits and How to Get Away with Murder, your favourite movies on corporate and criminal law, so I could have playful banter that'd feel real and organic.

Do you remember that night I called, pretending to be stranded outside my house? Playing the role of the damsel in distress? Wasting no time with your instinct to give solutions to problems as a man, you immediately invited me over—my mission accomplished. You even offered to book me a hotel, but ofcourse I declined it. “I don't want you to waste money and inconvenience yourself because of me Olisa. I'm okay staying on the couch. I already feel bad enough having to be a burden thus night.” You bought into that act. Ofcourse you did, I was playing my cards well. And from there, the rest was easy.

You thought my pauses were shyness. Oh no, my dearest, they were calculations. You thought my laughter was pure, my love, they were rehearsed to echo after yours, to make you trust me. Every word I spoke was measured, sharpened. Every gesture was deliberate. When I praised you, it wasn’t love, it was leverage. Your ego was my leash, and you wore it proudly. When you allowed me held you close, you thought it was affection. But I knew the exact pressure points to hold you with, so you’d never doubt me.

You once told me I was the best thing that ever happened to you. I almost laughed. Best? Yes. But not for the reasons you think.

Fate, you called it. Fate brought us together. Oh yes, Olisa, fate did. But fate has teeth. And tonight, it will bite.

While you believe fate handed you the perfect woman, I was already planning the end. Getting you to love and trust me was the hard part. Well, not that hard, considering you were bereft of friends so it was easy to warm my way into your heart, your mind and your soul. But once you’re gone, everything you own becomes mine. The houses you've willed to me. The lands. The cars. The money.

This ride with you, it's been intoxicating, really, watching you walk straight into my hands while thinking you were the hunter. But every journey has an end, doesn't it? I need to move over to my next target. So, as you sip your last cup of tea tonight, I’ll be smiling across from you, adoring, supportive, perfect.

So no, baby, it wasn’t fate. It won't take this credit.

It was me. Always me. Orchestrating. Planning. Striking

You deserve an award. Or a standing ovation. Or maybe both. Given how well you played your game. Such fantastic, phenomenal acting. It was seamless. Oscar-worthy even. I didn't suspect a thing; I didn't see it coming. And before my senses could sharpen and catch up to understand you were only using me for your selfish gains, you were gone.

I think about how gullible and stupid I was with you. How blindly I trusted. But how can I be blamed? You were perfect. Or so I thought.. I guess now it makes sense that you were too good to be true.

I should be blamed either way. I should take the fall. It was I who sent that friend request. Me, who texted first after you accepted. I'm not sure what I was looking for at the time. Love? Friendship? Or something to fill the void of being a 16-year-old girl left behind while all her friends went off to university. I remember, bit by bit, I started to enjoy your company. We started to text often. I was giving you bits and pieces of my day experiences, and before I knew it, I was always excited to ramble about it, withholding nothing.

I remember the first day you called. My heart thumped wildly in my chest. I was scared. I was surprised. But man, was I excited. You were calling me? That phone call lasted 16 minutes and 50 seconds, but it felt monumental. Like magic. I started to get more comfortable around you. Virtually ofcourse. You were in Lagos. I was here. We had never met, yet my relationship with you felt like Heaven. Or so I thought.

I remember when I told you I had feelings for you. I was 16. You were 26. What was I thinking? Where did that courage come from? Perhaps I should give you accolades here, you didn't take advantage of that immediately - my innocence and naivety. Perhaps that's why you said you liked me too, and we ended up in a talking stage for one year plus. I'm guessing that was you waiting till I turned 18. Old enough to be preyed on. Without guilt. All that time, you never defined what we had. I was too scared to ask. Too scared to scare you away with that question, "What are we?"?. But then you were getting all the privileges a person in a relationship could have. My time. My money. My love. My attention. My core attention. I'd say you were reciprocating these, but now I know better, you were bread-crumbling me. Feeding me bits and pieces of you, enough to hook me to stay, but not enough to sustain me.

I remember your nicknames for me then. How much you praised and showered me with compliments. You called me beautiful. Oh no, I'm wrong. It was gorgeous, you called me. On some days, it was chocolatey sweetness, and on some other days, it was honey dipped chocolate muffin. Before I knew it, before I could process, I was head over heels in love with you. And that was all you were waiting for. All you needed to take full charge. To take over and get me to do your bidding.

And soon, I was sending you my hard-earned money too. It started with your pay coming late and you having little to no funds to transport to work. N5000 left my account and made its way to yours. And next it was N15,000, your mum was sick, and you needed to get her drugs. Next, it was N50,000 to make up your rent.

I remember patiently curating a birthday present for you, July 6th that year. Carefully piecing together every detail of it. And then you rejected it. You said you had warned me not to bother. That was 20k wasted. But worse than the money was that pain that lingered in my heart...

And then came the plans for you to come see me here. I remember how super excited I was. Overjoyed. Ecstatic. I started planning ahead so I could ease you of any stress, especially financially. I booked your hotel room for the week's stay. I bought you turtle neck tops in your favourite colors. Got tickets to the cinema. I paid my chef friend to take care of your feeding, as I knew work would prevent me from handling that.

Then came the day you were to come, and I took a day off. For you and me. For us. You were scheduled to arrive by 12 pm. 11 am, I was at the airport. Texting you, keeping in touch. Expressing my joy.

12 pm, no sign of you.

1 pm, nothing. I was texting and calling. No response.

4 pm, I still didn't see you. My paranoia got the best of me, swallowing the entirety of my joy. I thought something bad had happened. But who would I call to verify you were okay? You’d never mentioned a single friend or colleague. No mutuals. No names. Just you. Always only you. A full week passed, and I still heard nothing. No calls. No messages. No posts. You vanished, and I was left clawing through every corner of my mind, trying to find you—make sense of you. I was drowning in worry and confusion.

And then you called me. Two weeks later. You didn't apologise for what you did. You didn’t acknowledge what you'd done. All you said was that you had done a lot of self-appraisals, and you couldn't continue with this anymore. You were breaking up with me? And that's when it dawned on me. I had been played. Used. And dumped.

I loved you. I did. Truly, I did. And I thought... foolishly... that you loved me too. But I guess it was just a game. And you played it well. Too damn well..

I'm not angry anymore. However, I hope one day you sit and you're haunted by the echoes of my kindness. I hope you feel the weight of what you discarded. I gave you everything... my time, my softness, my effort, my damn money. And you? You gave me lies, silence, and a coward’s goodbye. You see, the worst part isn't that you lied. It’s that you made me question my ability to love, to trust, to discern. You didn’t just break something. You tainted it. You stained what was once beautiful and pure.

So no, I don’t wish you well. Not today. Not anymore. I just hope karma has an excellent memory. And I hope she’s patient.

Because when she comes, I want her to take her time.

The thought of you evokes a mix of emotions. There's glee from revisiting the memories you gave me, there's joy from it too, from how beautifully you unfolded. But laced in all that sweetness is some sort of sadness, a wistful kind of sadness, one that hurts a little... Just a little. In knowing you'd never come back. And neither will the person you gave me memories with —not in the same way. Not like before. So while remembering you makes me smile... it also makes me ache.

However, I remember you so vividly. You planted yourself into my head, like a chip in my brain, settling perfectly, waiting to be activated by thoughts of him, so you'd project your contents into the screen of my mind, enveloping yourself over me and walking me down the aisle of memories. It's hard to resist when you do that so often, as you come, I let you take over...

You started as a random Saturday morning cloaked with house chores and lectures from my parents. I was mentally preparing myself for the boredom ahead, and out of nowhere, you took an unexpected spin and evolved into something tender. Golden. You gave me such beautiful emotions... that warm, cozy feeling. That feeling of safety. The one where you just sit back and sigh beautifully out of a full and relaxed heart.

Dear day, I've decided to name you, 4th January. Because that's who you are. That's who you'll always be. You are one in whom I am well pleased, so perhaps one more time... I'll let my brain indulge in the thoughts of you.

Your unexpected spin started when I got his text via SMS. It had become our way of communicating because I wasn't always online. He asked me to come online, and from there, I got an invite to the family house. I remember my train of thought.

"Family house? Shit. That's where his parents are? What do I wear? I need to look presentable, but at the same time look nice and maybe even sexy for him, so his eyes wouldn't leave my side. Am I going to make it in time? Is this really happening? Maybe I should give a rain check right now and not go embarrass myself. Maybe I should just honour the invitation and watch as everything else unfolds."

Dear 4th Jan, I'm sitting in my bathroom right now, glad that I didn't let my overthinking mess rob me of experiencing you. Because I almost did..

I met his twin first. I remember he said " finally" upon meeting me. I remember that made me smile. Genuinely. Deeply. Because it meant there were conversations about me already.. Maybe many. Maybe a few. But it didn't matter to me in that moment. He was there too. I saw a proud look on his face. Like he was well satisfied, I was who I was. It was mostly that look that said, "yeah, that's mine". That made me smile too. Even more genuinely. I was his...in that moment, I was...

And then he got me my favourite drink. A tiny gesture, sure, but it lit me up again. I smiled at the sweetness, the thoughtfulness. He asked me to come sit next to him, and then he'd touch my cheeks often. That made me flutter inside. I guess I wanted to hold his palm on my cheek for a bit and leave it there and just stare back at him. But I didn't. I think it haunts me, I didn't. But while it does, it doesn't last because there's a million and one other things to sweep it away and remind me how good a day you were, 4th Jan.

We watched TV with his twin. I watched them banter endlessly. It was so much fun to see them both do that. We all talked. We vibed so well. We laughed without caution. We ate too... And then he left his chair to stand behind me. His fingers found my shoulder blade and gently, very gently, massaged them. It was like he knew exactly where my stress sat, and he coaxed it all away. His hands found my neck, too, touching and massaging softly.

It wasn't just how relaxing it was as a process. It was also the person doing it. It was my attachment to him. It was the feeling of his hands on my body. It was all the warm butterflies that were erupting out of me. It was the way he picked up the pendant on my necklace, looked at me, and smiled. It was his smile. It was that smile, the kind that made you feel chosen. It was the way we locked hands together. It was the way we locked eyes, too, and shared something unspeakable, suspended between gazes. It was the happiness inside. It was the way he hugged me when I had to go. It was the forehead kiss that came with it. It was flagging down a tricycle for me to get home. It was texting at intervals to be sure I was safe.

Oh, 4th Jan, it was everything. You were everything. You were the feeling of being wanted... genuinely.... gently.. ..fully. And even though I know you won't come back, I'm glad I still have you inside of me. Alive. Breathing. Fervently burning.

But, I'm scared, 4th Jan. Of losing you. Afraid of you becoming vague and hazy inside of me. Of you being replaced by another. And another. And another till I have just bits and pieces of you left. I'm not sure what I'd do when that happens or if I'd even do anything. Perhaps I'd accept it as life doing what it does best and move on, happy that in the days I knew you, I held onto you so tightly that I let you stay, take over, overwhelm me. And maybe in that, I'll find peace...

And perhaps that’s all any day ever hopes for.. to be fully lived, fully felt, and never forgotten. So if you must leave me…I beg you, please leave your warmth behind. And if I’m lucky, just a little lucky, you’ll find your way back to me. Maybe not in the same way, maybe not with him. But in the same feeling. And when you do, I’ll know. Because I’ll sigh… And it’ll feel just like you.

With all the ache and softness,

Cheta.

I'm unsure how to begin this right now.

I'm tempted to ask you how you're doing, and then I remember: you're not human; you don't exist, at least not physically. Yet, you do. You're very much alive inside of me, haunting my mind, living rent-free in my head, taking up so much space, taking charge of my decisions and actions. Perhaps I should give you a name. I think it's only fair to. Considering how you've glued and attached yourself to me. To everything I do. My waking. My sleeping. My eating. My drinking.

Some days you drive me crazy, and some days you give me peace. Only that the percentage of the former is greater than the latter. Sometimes I'm unable to keep up with your endless rambling. Some days I want to take a vacation, escape away from you for just a bit, and shut you down for as long as possible. But then sometimes I can't because I need you, and I guess in some twisted way, you need me too. You make me replay words in my head. You make me piece out meanings from gestures, words, mannerisms… and these are meanings that are probably not there, there. You turn me into this junkie who needs reassurance and validation every now and then. Consistently waiting for a new hit. You make me second-guess myself.

The moment you begin with your negativity, which is usually your first approach to everything, it takes one line from you to create a full train of paranoia and anxiety inside of me, and before I know it, I've said hello to this downward spiral again.

I think sometimes I wish you were human, that you had a face, a body, a name, so we could have a conversation. Sit across each other and talk. So I could ask you to be kinder. To tread gently. So we could decide on better ways I could live and breathe and not feel you down my throat every time. I think I may have imagined how the conversation would flow. You'd take up the role of a parent and try to convince me that you're doing this for my good. That you're trying to protect me. That you love me. But do you? Does it even make sense to ask you that? I guess I treat you as an entity different from myself, and that may be unsettling, too. But at the end of the day, I know you're me. But are you?

Are you me? Am I you? Or rather, are you a reflection of me? Born out of my thought patterns, my deepest fears and concerns, my greatest worries, and on a few occasions, my happiness and excitement.

I'm curious to know if you'd ever leave me. Not necessarily because I want you to go, but because you've been here for as long as I can remember, I'm not even sure what life without you should be like. Isn't that supposed to be toxic? To not know who I am away from you..

Oh dear voice, I need answers. But I guess this isn't one of those scenes in Disney cartoons where the princess in distress cries out and gets her answer almost immediately. Like Cinderella and the fairy godmother. Like Snow white and the wishing well.

I think it's strange how now that I've called you out, you've gone silent on me. Even though I know you'll return.

I guess until I hear you inside of me again, I'll bask in this solemn peace I've got. I need it.

And perhaps when you return, we can find a compromise to a happy, peaceful living... or not...