Look, I have fucked women from more tribes than I can count on two hands. Igbo girls, one from CCI, and one from RCCG, who prayed in tongues before they came, and Yoruba women who could quote proverbs while riding a veiny dick.

Even an Hausa girl who kept the hijab on until the second bottle of cold Vodka. Let’s not even talk about white girls from the Midwest [ I went to a British school in Lagos with white people ] who said “like” every third word and still knew how to disappear their boyfriend’s number the night they decided I was more interesting.

Delta women who screamed in their dialect and then asked, in perfect English, whether I could help with rent next month. Medical students from College Of Medicine, University of Lagos, who looked soft until the lights went off and then negotiated like they were closing a deal.

Yeah, as far back as I can remember, even Caribbean women who danced on me in public and then checked my phone when I slept.

Different accents. Different bodies. Different “taste.” Different ways of saying “I love you.” But it’s the same script.

To be fair, modern relationships are not broken, they are working exactly as re-designed by social media standards and unrealistic expectations. The old operating system, which had loyalty as default, exclusivity as sacred, staying as virtue, actually got patched out.

What we have now is a dirty marketplace with better lighting and worse souls, where people still pair up, post anniversary pictures, and say the “I love you” words.

But underneath, the transaction is naked: you give me your body, I give you access to my resources or status or attention. When the exchange rate shifts, so does the loyalty.

I have been on both sides of that table. I have been the man whose girlfriend was fucking someone else. I have been the someone else. The second role taught me more.

See, nobody starts with the big betrayal anymore. That would be inefficient. They start with the soft violations that keep the primary relationship intact while they test the market.

She will text another man “good morning” with a heart emoji while you’re in the shower. She will stay online until 2:02 AM, talking to someone who “just gets her.”

She will like every photo of the guy from the office retreat and call it “supporting a colleague”, or “he’s just a friend.”

The one that pisses me off the most is having a male best friend who somehow always needs emotional support at 11:00 PM.

She will delete the messages before you can see them, then look you in the face and say she has nothing to hide.

You will notice. You will feel the shift in her energy; the way her phone lights up and her face softens for half a second before she remembers you exist. And you will decide to tolerate it, because the alternative is starting over in a dating pool that smells like regret and leftover perfume.

I have watched men do this calculation in real time. One friend, a solid guy with a good job, told me he knew his girlfriend was emotionally cheating for eight months. He stayed because “at least she’s not fucking him.”

She was.

I know because she fucked me twice. Once, in his apartment while he was on a work trip. She cried after the first time and said she felt guilty. Then, she scheduled the second time herself.

Micro-cheating is not the gateway. It is the main event for people who still want the benefits of a relationship without the full cost of fidelity.

It lets them keep the stability, the social proof, the shared rent, while they shop for better terms. And the rest of us have been trained to call it “normal.” To say “everyone does it.” To lower the bar until the floor is the ceiling.

It hits different when you’re the one being micro-cheated on. There’s this slow erosion of how trust doesn’t shatter; it just thins, like fabric left in the scorching sun, like the one around UNILAG’s Sports Centre.

One day you realize you stopped asking questions because the answers were already written on her face.

Let me be crude, because the truth is crude. Most men are negotiating for consistent access to a body they find attractive, plus the emotional labor of being chosen.

From experience, and probably personal opinion, 8/10 of the men chasing you don’t actually love you. They just want your punani… that’s it, just your pink meat.

Most women, on the other hand, are negotiating for resources, lifestyle elevation, safety, and the social status that comes with being chosen by a man who can provide those things.

Love is the marketing language. The actual product is the exchange.

I have seen this across every tribe. The Igbo girl who told me she loved me after two weeks and then asked, two days later, whether I could help her with her sister’s friend’s brother’s school fees.

The white girl who moved in “because the connection was so deep” and then started treating my card like a shared account simply because I was fucking her. That was her “solid” reason.

Bro, even the Hausa girl who said money didn’t matter and then went quiet for three days when I told her I was between contracts.

The soft-spoken white girl who never asked for anything directly, but somehow always needed rides to places that cost money and dinners that required reservations and a minimum of ₦510,000.00

None of them were villains. They were rational actors in a market that rewards extraction.

The men are not better. We chase the body first. We perform provision because that is the price of continued access. We lie about our intentions the same way they lie about theirs.

The craziest thing about men? We can lie for months, even years, as long as we keep shifting panties, and thrusting that vagina without mercy.

I don’t care whether you like this or not, but I’d be angrily honest. You see my gender, yeah? We can fuck anything that gives us consent, even though few of us are disciplined, same as the women.

Everybody is running a soft con and hoping the other person doesn’t notice until the feelings have already attached.

The probability of meeting someone who is not running a version of this script is low. Not zero. But low enough that when you meet them you will almost not believe it.

You will wait for the other shoe. Sometimes it never drops. Well…few times, it does.

I have been the man with money and watched women rearrange their faces when they realized the money was temporary.

I have been the man with less money and watched the same women become suddenly “busy.” The body is the entry fee. The money is the retention cost. Remove either and the relationship starts negotiating its own end.

This is the line that should be tattooed on every person’s forehead before they enter a relationship, especially in this stupid Lagos and that thick dick veined Abuja.

I have watched men try to love women into loyalty. It does not work. I have watched women try to sex men into commitment. It does not also work.

Desire is not a contract and attention is not ownership. The person who wants to leave will leave. The person who wants to cheat will cheat. Your goodness is not a leash.

I learned this the hard way with a woman from West London. She was brilliant, beautiful, the kind of girl who made other men look twice and then look again.

We were “exclusive.”

She told me she was done with games. Three months in, I found out she was still fucking her ex on the weekends she claimed to be visiting her aunt. When I confronted her, she cried and said she was confused. And that she was “sorry.”

Listen, cheating is never a mistake because the process is way too long to even be called a mistake.

Confusion is the oldest alibi in the book. She was not confused. She was keeping options warm.

I have been the option, even more times than I am proud of. I have been the main cock and side-cock. It’s shitty out here.

There is a particular look a woman gets when she is deciding whether to keep you as a secret or upgrade you to main. I have seen that look in hotel rooms, in cars, in the bathroom of someone else’s house while her boyfriend slept two rooms away.

The morality of it is thin, and the honesty of the market? It’s thick.

She was not choosing me because I was better. She was choosing me because the primary arrangement had stopped delivering the intensity she wanted, and I was convenient intensity.

People cheat with the ones they don’t want to build a life with, and they also cheat with the ones they do.

Sometimes, the side piece is pure physical. Other times, the side piece is the person they actually prefer, kept in the dark until the primary relationship can be safely dismantled.

I have been both.

The second version hurts more, even when you are the one being preferred, because you realize you are not a choice. You are a contingency plan with benefits.

I’m pissed !!! Let me write !!!

This one is common enough now that it barely raises eyebrows in certain circles.

Most men? We will date you and two other women at the same time. I’m not talking about situationship language. Actual overlapping relationships. We will fuck both of you.

How about most women? They will compare the sex, the money, the emotional availability, and the future potential. They’ll will run a quiet A/B test on their own lives.

Then they will choose. Or they will keep both running until one of you forces a decision.

I have been in the test. Twice that I know of. Once with a Yoruba girl who told me she needed a space to “focus on herself.” She was focusing on herself and two other men.

The other guy had more money. I had better sex and more time. She chose the money.

Fair enough.

The market is allowed to be honest even when the people in it are not.

Another time, a mixed girl who moved between tribes and switch guys like Aston Martin gears. She told me she loved the way I made her feel. Walai, she told him the same thing.

When I found out, she said she needed to “see which connection was real.” As if realness is something you measure by running parallel trials. The cruelty is not in the comparison. It’s in the performance of exclusivity while the comparison is running.

Most Men do versions of this too. We are not saints. But the particular flavor of dating two men simultaneously while both believe they are the only one has become a recognizable strategy.

It is efficient because it reduces the risk of settling. It also destroys the possibility of the very thing most people claim to want: being chosen without reservation.

I have seen things that would sound like bad fiction if I had not lived near them.

A woman who flew her side piece into the same city where her fiancé was attending a conference, fucked him in a hotel two streets away, then returned to the fiancé’s bed the same night and posted a couple photo the next morning.

And the guy she fucked wrote a beautiful comment under that post.

The fiancé found out months later through a location tag, but he stayed and the wedding still happened. I don’t know if he ever recovered the ability to trust the sound of her phone vibrating.

There was actually guy, my guy back then, who maintained two full relationships in two different cities for fourteen months. It was crazy how both women actually thought they were primary.

He had two sets of clothes, two toothbrushes, two stories about work travel.

One of the women got pregnant, and he chose her. The other woman found out through a mutual friend and tried to set his car on fire.

The car survived, but my guy’s reputation didn’t.

A girl who used her boyfriend’s apartment as the location for her affair with his best friend. They fucked on the same sheets and she washed them later, so that it won’t smell of his perfume; OUD AL LAYL, by ARABIYAT.

You can check it out though. It lasts up to 24/36 hours, but don’t use it on brightly colored clothes; it’ll stain them. It costs between ₦16,000.00 to ₦20,000.00 depending on the vendor and other factors.

The boyfriend never knew until the best friend got drunk and confessed out of guilt. The girlfriend’s defense was that she “felt more alive” with the friend. The boyfriend moved out.

The friend and the girl lasted six weeks.

I have been in a version of this. Not the pregnancy or the car abeg, but na the apartment. You know…the borrowed time.

The way the secrecy itself becomes an aphrodisiac until it becomes a weight. There is a particular silence that falls after the orgasm when both of you remember that someone else exists who believes they have a claim.

That silence is louder than any moan.

These stories are not rare. They are just rarely told cleanly. People sand the edges when they recount them.

They add justifications or they talk about trauma and timing and “what the relationship was missing.” The missing piece is usually the willingness to end one thing before starting another. That willingness has become optional.

See eh, here is what the transactional model does not advertise: the residue.

You can win the exchange and still lose the ability to believe anyone. You can even be the one who gets chosen and still flinch when her phone lights up.

Bro, you can be the side piece who gets upgraded and still wonder, every quiet night, whether you are just the current highest bidder.

I have sat in rooms after the truth came out and watched grown men cry in ways they did not cry at funerals. It wasn’t even because the sex was gone.

The story they told themselves about being special was gone. The story is always the real casualty.

Women carry their own version too. The ones who extract successfully still look over their shoulders. They know the same market that elevated them can demote them.

The body that was the entry fee becomes less valuable with time, and the money that was the retention cost starts looking for newer entry fees. Everyone is temporary in a system designed for turnover.

I have held women while they sobbed about the man who left them for someone younger, thinner, less complicated. I have been the younger, thinner, less complicated option.

The symmetry is ugly. It does not make me feel powerful. It makes me feel like a participant in a machine that grinds people into positions and then discards the ones who can no longer perform.

There are nights when the loneliness hits different. No, I’m not talking about the absence of a body in the bed, but the absence of a witness who is not also evaluating.

You know…someone who is not running the numbers or who would stay even if the money dried up or the body softened or the attention from others increased.

That person exists. I have met a few.

They are statistically rare enough that when you find them, you will be tempted to sabotage it just to confirm the pattern still holds.

In a high-trust environment, loyalty is rational. In a low-trust, high-option environment, loyalty is a competitive disadvantage until proven otherwise.

People have adapted and they actually keep soft landings and maintain orbiters. They invest just enough to keep the primary relationship functional while private channels stay open.

They call it “not putting all their eggs in one basket.” Soke stupid ones even call it “protecting their peace.”

They call it anything except what it is: a refusal to be fully chosen or to fully choose. I used to get angry about this. Used to? I’m still angry!

Somehow, the anger has cooled into something closer to grief for the version of connection that required less armor and for the nights when you could believe the person next to you was not also calculating.

Should I call it the grief for the simplicity of “you are mine and I am yours” without the asterisks?

The dating pool is messy because the incentives are messy. Apps turned partners into inventory. Social media turned private life into content.

Economic independence reduced the cost of exit.

Quick one: Vote Tinubu out.

Even cultural messaging elevated self-prioritization above mutual sacrifice. None of these things are purely evil.

Together, they produce an environment where treating people as temporary makes more sense than treating them as permanent.

You can still find real ones. They are usually the people who have been burnt enough times to stop performing and start selecting. They move slower and disclose earlier.

They end things cleanly when the fit is wrong instead of running parallel tracks. They are not impressed by the game because they have already played it and lost things that mattered more than the win.

I am not writing this from a mountain of moral superiority. I have been the man who slept with someone’s girlfriend.

I have been the man who stayed too long in arrangements that were already dead. I have also been the man who compared women in my head while telling them they were unique.

The market trained me the same way it trained them. The difference is I am no longer interested in pretending the training did not work.

Some nights, I still catch myself hoping. A new woman will walk into the frame and the old calculations will quiet down. Her phone will stay face-down and her eyes will not scan the room for better options.

She will not need me to be a solution to a problem she has not named. And I will not need her to be a prize that proves I am still in the game.

It happens, rarely, but briefly and beautifully.

Most of the time, the old patterns reassert. The body is still the entry fee, I won’t lie. The resources are still the retention cost and the micro-cheating still starts soft.

The big cheating still finds its justifications. The girls still date both to know who is better. The men still pretend they do not notice until the evidence is undeniable.

And the ones who want something cleaner keep walking through the same messy pool, looking for the few who are swimming against the current instead of with it.

You cannot fuck loyalty into a person and you can’t negotiate a soul out of a transaction.

But you can stop lying about the nature of the market you are in. You can stop calling the extraction “love” just because the sex was good and the photos looked right.

The pool is messy and the incentives are misaligned. The nonsense stories we tell ourselves are mostly marketing.

And still, some of us keep looking for the person who makes the whole ugly system feel, for a little while, beside the point. That search is not stupid, it’s just expensive.

And the currency is the one thing the market cannot price correctly, which is the willingness to be all in when everything around you is teaching you to keep one foot out the door.

I have dated across tribes and I’ve seen the same hunger wearing different faces. I’m still, against my better judgment, available for the rare meal that doesn’t come with a bill at the end.

Maybe that makes me a fool or the last kind of optimist the current age has not fully killed. Either way, the body is still the entry fee. The rest is negotiation.

And the ones who pretend otherwise are usually the ones running the hardest game of all.

You still want to date in this modern time, especially in Lagos & Abuja?

Well, pray hard. There are still good men and women out there

I decided your name when I was twenty-five years old, in the year 2026.

I haven’t yet met my angel, your mother; the woman who will carry you until the time of birth arrives, or argued with her about the colour of the nursery, or watched her sleep with one hand on her stomach the way future fathers somehow already know how to do.

You are still only a decision, a quiet certainty in my Igbo heart, and already, I am writing to you as if you are real enough to one day open this letter with my hands still trembling on the other side of time.

I studied Cell Biology and Genetics at the University of Lagos ( I hope it’s called “UNILAG” by the time you’re reading this).

I can tell you how chromosomes arrange themselves, how traits travel down bloodlines like secret letters. And still, I cannot predict which parts of you will look like me and which parts will simply be entirely your own, arriving from somewhere I will never fully trace.

Maybe your laugh or stubborness will be mine. Maybe nothing of me will show on the surface at all, and the only inheritance will be this letter, and the way I will one day look at you as if the universe finally decided to answer a prayer I never knew how to word.

I don’t know if you will be loud the way some children are loud, filling a house before you have even walked into the room, or quiet the way I was, watching everything before deciding what to say about any of it.

I only know you are coming, someday. And I want you to have this before you have me. Even before I get the chance to get anything wrong, or right, in the responsibility of raising you.

I want to tell you something the world is going to try to teach you long before I get the chance to say it myself. I want my voice to reach you first, if I can manage it.

You are going to be beautiful. I’m not guessing or performing the blind optimism of fathers who have not yet seen their daughters.

I am telling you a fact that already lives in me. You will be so beautiful that you’d still look good, even in a broken mirror.

If you think I am lying, go look at yourself in the full-length mirror in your room right now, by the time you are reading this. Look until the part of you that still doubts softens. I really want you to look until you understand that the love I’m writing with, already sees you as one.

People will notice you. Doors will open slightly faster for you than they open for other people, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you actually did to earn them.

That is not fair. It never was. I would rather tell you the truth about the world than protect you from it with pretty lies.

Here is what I need you to understand early, way earlier than most people are ever told this clearly:

Being noticed is not the same as being valuable. And being wanted by a room is not the same as being able to stand steady in that room alone, on your own two feet, if everyone else who was admiring you walked out of it tomorrow.

This is not going to be the typical emotional love story fathers write to their daughters. I am going to be very honest with you because I love you more than I love your comfort, even though you will be comfortable enough in this life.

What you need is attentiveness.

You are going to grow up in a world that asks more of women than it asks of men, unfairly, quietly, in ways that rarely get written down anywhere official, but you will feel in your bones long before anyone explains them to you directly.

You will be expected to be soft and strong at the same time, gentle enough to be liked, and tough enough to survive, without ever being taught how those two things are supposed to fit together inside one person.

You will watch men get called “ambitious” for the exact behaviour that gets women called “difficult.” You will watch a man’s anger get read as passion and a woman’s anger get read as instability, sometimes in the very same meeting, over the very same disagreement.

Look at me when I say this, even though you cannot yet see me, or if we’re reading this together:

You will grow up with a phone (or another advanced technology) in your hand from an early age, and that phone will show you a thousand curated, filtered, expertly lit versions of other women’s lives every single day.

And some nights, no matter how much I love you, no matter how many times I tell you the truth about all of it, you might still lie awake comparing your actual, complicated, three-dimensional life to somebody else’s careful two-dimensional performance of theirs.

I cannot fully protect you from that. I can only tell you now, before it starts working on you, that comparison built from filtered images was never a fair fight to begin with, and it was never actually about you losing.

But when you start feeling this way, remember what Zanele means:

“You are enough.”

You will have to think about your safety in ways I never had to think about mine at your age; which street to walk down, which situations to avoid being alone in, which men’s attention to take as a compliment and which to take as a warning, sometimes having to make that judgment in seconds, with imperfect information, simply because the world has not yet made that judgment unnecessary for you to have to make at all.

I hate that this is true. I hate it more that I cannot simply promise you it will not be. What I can promise is that I will teach you to trust the specific, quiet alarm in your own heart when something feels wrong, faster and more completely, than I will teach you to worry about being polite to someone who is making you feel small.

You will, if you choose a career, likely have to prove yourself twice over in rooms where a man proved himself once. You may have to decide, at some point, between a version of ambition the world finds acceptable in a woman, and a version that is actually true to what you want.

When that day comes, I hope you choose the true one, loudly, regardless of who in the room finds it inconvenient.

I am not speaking from some jargons in textbooks. I have watched this nonsense unfold in boardrooms and late-night strategy sessions, and quiet hallways where the real decisions get made.

I have seen capable women shrink themselves by half an inch, so the men around them could keep standing tall. I refuse to raise a daughter who learns that half-inch as survival. F*cking stand tall !!!

My love, no matter how much money I eventually have, there will still be moments, or entire seasons, where you will still lose or fail. Money is only a tool. And like every other tool, it can break in your hands at the worst possible time.

When that happens, cry if you must. Do not suppress the emotion. When you are finished crying, wipe your face, stand, and remember your name again.

I will be there to put my hand on your shoulder, pull you into my chest, and tell you the same thing again and again until it sinks past the pain; you are still enough.

I will never force you to shut the feeling out. Feel it. It does something necessary to the body that I cannot fully explain, something that hardens into strength only after it has been allowed to move through you.

There is something that loss taught me, underneath all the grief and the doubt, and I want to hand it to you early so you do not have to learn it the same painful way I did:

Nothing in this life is guaranteed to stay. Not people, attention, beauty or youth. Not any of the things the world will spend years teaching you to treat as permanent currency.

The only thing that reliably stays is whatever you have actually built inside yourself, quietly, on the ordinary days when nobody was watching closely enough to admire it.

I learned something else the hard way too, in a relationship long before you existed, with a woman I loved and failed in small, ordinary ways that mattered more than I understood at the time.

I did not call when I should have called. I did not send the small proof of love that costs nothing but attention. I told myself the big feelings were enough. I was wrong. I lost her.

And I carried that lesson for years afterward, turning it over like a squeezed Naira note in my pocket, trying to understand exactly where I had gone wrong.

What I learned, eventually, is this:

Real, lasting love is not built on being wanted. It’s built on being chosen; actively, repeatedly, in the small, unglamorous moments nobody is clapping for.

I want you to know the difference between those two things before anyone has the chance to confuse you about it. And I want you, when you are old enough, to demand that kind of daily, deliberate choosing from anyone who wants a place in your life.

Never, I repeat, never settle for someone who only shows up loudly for the moments other people are watching.

I also want you to learn how money works, not just how to spend it, but how to earn, save, grow it, and survive without someone else’s income covering your life if you ever need to.

I do not want that knowledge to come from fear. I want it to come from the plain fact that a woman who understands her own finances answers to nobody but herself. That kind of quiet freedom is worth more than almost anything a room full of admirers could ever offer you.

I want you to know your own body, early, clearly, without shame or euphemism. Exactly how it works. What it needs. What it deserves; respect, consent, care, and full ownership that belongs to you alone.

It’s not something to be negotiated away because someone louder or older or more insistent made you feel it was easier to give in than to hold your ground.

I want you to have women in your life you can actually call at 2:00 AM. Women who will tell you the truth even when it costs them your temporary comfort, because friendship like that will carry you through seasons I will not always be able to reach.

There are things you’ll never find in a textbook, but only from quality relationships. You read some, but you get told some. It’s never in books.

And I want you to become one of those women for someone else too.

I want you to fail at things. Actually fail. Even more than once, without believing failure says anything permanent about your worth.

I have built things that collapsed before I built things that lasted. The collapsing was never wasted. It was simply tuition, paid toward whatever eventually worked.

I want you to be angry when anger is the correct response, and I never want you to apologize for it the way the world will sometimes pressure you to.

I want you to say no completely, without a paragraph of justification attached, because I do not want you to grow up believing your own boundaries require anyone else’s approval before they count.

I DON’T WANT YOU TO FALL IN LOVE, I NEED YOU TO GROW IN LOVE, SLOWLY.

…with someone who earns it across ordinary days rather than winning you over in one impressive night. And I want you to walk away, without guilt, from anyone who tries to make you smaller so they can feel larger standing next to you.

I want you to pray honestly, including the angry prayers, especially the ones with real doubt sitting inside them, because I do not believe faith that has never been tested is worth very much.

I would rather you build something real, even something complicated, than something borrowed and untested that collapses the first time life actually asks something hard of it.

I have spent years building things; a business out of almost nothing, ideas nobody believed in until they eventually worked, a version of myself steadier than the one who used to be angry more often than he needed to be, lazier than he should have been about anything requiring real thought.

I did that building slowly, uncomfortably, mostly without applause. And I want you to understand something about that process before you ever start your own version of it:

Nobody hands you capability. You build it, one unremarkable Tuesday at a time, long before anyone is watching closely enough to notice you are doing it.

I hope you are beautiful, in whatever way the word ends up meaning to you. I know people will notice you the moment you walk into a room.

But more than any of that, I hope that when the room eventually empties, and it always does; every room does, eventually, you go home to somebody solid. Not just someone who loves you (though I hope for that too, deeply).

I hope you go home to yourself; fully capable, whole, needing nobody’s attention to confirm that you were always worth exactly as much as you already knew you were.

I have called you Zanele, but I don’t know your identity yet. I don’t know if I will get the chance to tell you all of this in person, slowly, across a childhood, or whether some of it will only ever exist here, written down before you existed, waiting for a day you are old enough to actually read it properly.

Either way, I want you to know this now, as early as I can possibly give it to you:

You were never meant to just be admired. You were meant to be capable, chosen, and completely, fully your own person.

You are going to come into a world that will ask you to shrink in a dozen small, ordinary ways before you are even old enough to notice it’s happening. I intend to spend your entire childhood teaching you to notice it happening anyway, and to refuse.

Now read this next part as many times as you need to. I am literally on my knees as I write it on the 20th of August, 2026, at 7:01 AM, in the morning, because some truths require the body to lower itself before the words will come out right.

Your hormones will run riot. You will find a man you like. That is normal. Allow yourself to like him. Take it slowly. Get to know him. Introduce him to me when the time feels right. I can only advise and beg you, please: do not give your body to a man who is not your husband.

But if you do, and by any chance you get pregnant, do not hurt yourself. There is always love at home. There is always love from Dad. Make sure you return to it. Whatever happens, you come home.

If a man ever tries to rape you, you have my permission, and my full covering, to defend your life with everything you have, even if it requires taking his own life, I will be there to stand with you, even in the highest court.

If I am not there, the relationships I have spent years building will be. The world is bathed in teeth and claws. Learn to protect yourself physically, mentally. emotionally and spiritually.

But do not become what you hate. Do not let the violence rewrite the person I am raising you to be.

I will be waiting for you, however long it takes. And I will be building the kind of man worth learning any of this from, long before you ever arrive to test whether I actually meant it.

With everything I have to give.

Imagine a human like me, standing for you, with you and by you, how much more GOD?

— Your father, Dad, gist partner, soldier, prayer partner and most importantly, your friend.

…omo, I still remember the exact weight of her head on my chest that very night in the short-let at Gbagada Phase II, Lagos.

The air-conditioner was fighting a losing battle. And just outside the short-let, about two or more generators were growling like angry dogs.

Inside, the only light came from the phone she had left face-down on, bedside the table. Her perfume, probably Lamsat Harir by Arabiyat, had mixed with sweat and the cheap wine we finished earlier.

She was already half-asleep, one long sexy ass leg thrown over mine like she belonged there. For a few seconds, I let myself believe she did.

Then the thought arrived, quiet and sharp;

“This is the third different woman in 8 days, TOBE.”

I did not even move. I just stared at the ceiling and felt something inside me go still. I can’t call it “guilt” exactly, but it was just something heavier.

I’m struggling to find the best description but it’s like the moment you realise the ground under your feet has been soft for a long time and you are finally starting to sink.

That was five years ago, and I was clearly 20 years old. I had already lost count of the bodies. But I used to wear the numbers like a joke.

“My penis, my choice.”

I said it the way you’d say “God abeg.” It was both a claim and a shield.

I’m almost 26 years old now. Honestly, I no longer say it.

This is not a sermon, it’s actually far from it. I hate sounding religious… I so much hate it that I don’t get close to religious people. But here’s the thing: I am not cleaner than you. I am just further down the road, and the view from here is different.

Let me take you back further, because the beginning always looks like freedom.

I was 19 years old at that time, living in a self-contain in Shomolu. That apartment smelt of kerosene and my sexual ambition.

I think I was earning NGN180,000.00/month that year, but my weekends were really loud. I mean, it was 2019, so things were not as bad as they are now.

Fridays meant Island. One of my guys always knew a house party, a friend of a friend with Shisha [ I don’t know if I spelt it correctly ], well…weed, and cold drinks.

We moved in packs.

You know… foolish boys who still believed the night owed us something.

Na she come meet me o. I didn’t approach any woman this time around. Na she use her legs, waka come meet me.

As if that justifies anything

It was the third time I “grinded” a girl a bit older than me. We danced, toasted cheap wines [ probably fake sef ], passed puffs to each other, laughed and even kissed.

Yes, I kissed a stranger that night. I can’t remember the exact full details, but Caleb, one of the devils spoiling me, saw what was going down and handed me Golden Circle.

By 11:56 PM or so, Brian tossed his Camry car key to me, and within few minutes, Cynthia and I were heading to the short-let close to Brian’s house. He wanted to use the car the next day, so that short-let was the best option.

“She say love is blind, but I dey see am for your eyes o… eh, for your eyes o…”

She was humming that song by Davido.

This girl even held my hand the whole time, like we had already decided on something. We got to the short-let and she came down, but her mini skirt was in disagreement with her thighs and her big soft watery ass.

She adjusted as if she didn’t know that it was almost impossible to for that same skirt to embrace her knees.

I don’t know who made NEPA angry that night and they decided to punish the entire street by painting everywhere as dark as the hair between a 40-year old man’s ass. That was why that nonsense generator was on.

“I don’t usually do this.”

“Me too, but I can’t take my eyes off you.”

Both of us were lying, and we knew it, but nobody cared.

Cynthia had really long legs, dark in complexion, a bit thick with moderately pointed nose and smokey eyes.

I don’t want to say that she looked like the typical Lagos runs-girl because almost all the men in Lagos are also low-key Ashawos, dressed in suit and “Oud For Glory” perfume by Lattafa.

She was definitely taller than me, but one thing I liked was how clean she was, regardless of her skin colour. I was drunk with wine, so the moment she touched my chest and smiled, I couldn’t resist anymore.

I was literally 19, and I think she was 23? Yeah, 23. But age is just age, innit?

I wanted to say we had the best sex, but nahh… Toyosi’s mum’s was better. Don’t get me wrong, Cynthia was an excellent 7.5/10, but T’s mum was 9/10.

I’d have gone into insane erotic details, but today’s Monday and you shouldn’t be distracted.

Wait, who cares about distraction? So, here’s the clean gist;

She slowly unbuttoned my shirt as we kissed further. You know that unconscious precision that your hands master within few minutes of romance, even while your eyes have refused to open itself due to dopamine?

Exactly… you sabi. We continued kissing, as my hands reach for her vagina, instead of her ass. I was flickering while we stood and she gave soft moans in between.

Her lips would occasionally slip from mine because I was flickering and fingering deeply at a slow-fast moderate speed, just the way a girl would touch herself in her room, privately.

Look, nobody teaches you these things. You just know them, and most times, you do them with perfection, as if you’ve been taking deliberate lectures.

She started twisting her waist out of pleasure, leaning over, forward and tilted sideways as I fingered her more.

I stopped and she put it back herself and said, “don’t you dare stop.” In few minutes, my hands were wet with her natural oceanic water, which has some level of viscosity and jelly-like feel like Okra.

This lasted for about 7 minutes and she bent over by herself. I felt proud because I was giving her instructions without saying a word. My hands and eyes were talking

We had a great sex, four rounds to be precise. It was her first time, but somehow, she couldn’t get enough. I don’t know… she wasn’t comfortable with BJs, especially when we’re just meeting for the first time.

When it was over, she slept facing me. I watched her breathe and felt powerful. Truth be told, it wasn’t even because of the tasteful sex, but she had chosen me for the night and I had accepted without hesitation.

That felt like control. It really felt like adulthood.

I woke up before her and made eggs. She smiled when she saw the plate and we exchanged numbers. I never called. She never called either. The silence didn’t exactly hurt. It just felt clean and weirdly mature.

That was the first lesson Lagos taught me; you can touch someone completely and still leave nothing behind. Or so I thought.

I started getting used to the “lifestyle.” And that was where my life started drifting apart. I didn’t find younger women attractive anymore. My system got re-wired and I was always drooling over older women.

I became wild. From a girl at work who stayed late and then stayed the night. A campus friend who came to “visit” and left at dawn. A woman I met at a wedding in Ikeja who texted me three days later with a hotel address. Toyosi’s mum, Efe, Folake etc.

Each time, the story began with laughter and ended with a polite exit. Each time, I told myself I was free.

I started noticing the small things.

The way some of them looked at the door while getting dressed, already halfway gone. The way I checked my phone while they were still in the bathroom.

The way the pleasure stayed in the body but never reached the part of me that wanted to be known. I ignored those details. They felt like overthinking.

Then one night came, in early 2020, before COVID-19 became very serious, I brought a girl back to my apartment. We were both drunk enough to be honest. In the middle of everything, she suddenly stopped and said:

“You don’t even see me, do you?”

I laughed it off and told her she was talking nonsense. I’d have gone into details but I can’t even remember them, to be honest.

We finished and she left before 6:45 AM without saying goodbye. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt, for the first time, a thin crack of fear.

What if she was right? What if I had trained myself so well at not seeing that I could no longer see even when I wanted to?

I pushed the thought away. There was always another night coming.

It did came and it was on a random Tuesday in 2021.

I was in my new place in Yaba. You know…better salary, big boy, better furniture, more condom packs, same habits.

A woman I had been seeing casually for three weeks came around, and we fucked all throughout the night. My landlord had to send a warning message on WhatsApp because the neighbors were complaining.

Well, she left around 7:00 AM, but it was like something in me also left with her. Could it be my “glory”? I don’t think so, or maybe I’m not just religious.

I stood in the shower and let the water run over my face. When I looked in the mirror I did not recognise the man looking back. Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet wrongness. Like, the face was mine but the eyes had gone somewhere else.

That same week, I ran into an old senior friend from secondary school. He had gotten married already and I wasn’t even invited because the ceremony took place in Edinburgh.

I think he was 28 already and his family were pretty alright financially. He came back to Nigeria to inspect a project he was working on and quickly go back.

We sat in a Restaurant near Ojuelegba and he talked about his wife, the way some men talk about God; soft, certain, almost shy.

He said they waited, but the waiting nearly killed him some nights. He also said the first time they finally came together felt like arriving home after years of sleeping in other people’s houses.

I laughed and called him “omo ase”. But inside me, something twisted. He wasn’t a soft boy as I had called him. That’s actually pure discipline, which I obviously didn’t have.

That very night, I could not sleep. I kept seeing the faces of women I had been with. Not all of them though, just the ones who had looked at me like they hoped I would stay a little longer.

I had given them my body and kept my actual self locked away. I called it “choice”, but it was beginning to look like something else.

I lived in Enugu and a bit in Abuja, but from what I have seen, Lagos sells a particular kind of freedom.

It looks good under fairy lights and bass. The thing looks like control… you know, more like you are the one deciding.

What it does not show you is the slow training of the heart.

Every time you join your body to someone who is not staying, you practice a certain kind of leaving. You learn how to open just enough and close again before anything real can take root.

At first it feels like skill. Later, it feels like damage. Walai, I watched it happen to people around me, many times.

My friend Tunde, the one who used to say “no strings attached to bitches” like a motto. Even Johnson, whose favourite mantra was, “I just wan fuck, I no wan meet any girl Mama for marriage.”

Down to pastor’s son, Gabriel, who used to say, “No safe pussy in Lagos, stay on guard 24/7.” In fact, I had to come up with my own nonsensical slang, “Everybody na ashawo for Lagos. Na who them catch don cast.”

The stupid guy, Tunde, got a girl pregnant by the age of 24, and begged her to abort it. I specifically told the girl not to, because she could die from the process.

“How the fuck is that your business? Will you carry the child? Will you carry it for 9-months?”

Today is, or should I say was her remembrance? It’s been 5 years since she died from the abortion. I was more pained than her parents. I told her, I really did, but she didn’t listen.

Tunde cried like a child, but I felt like stabbing him. This girl was unnecessarily beautiful and she came from a good home. I…I had crush on her for 3 weeks and 2 days.

One “mistake” and she waved the earth a goodbye.

Tunde could not still keep a relationship past three months. He would find something wrong every time the woman started wanting more.

He told me once, late at night after too many drinks, that he was scared of being fully seen. He had spent so many years giving only the surface, that the idea of giving the rest felt like standing naked in traffic.

Yes, he was struggling to stay committed, and honestly, me too. Even till today… I’m not going to lie.

I deleted his contact information a long time ago.

There was Chioma, who worked in banking and treated men the way some men treat women; use, enjoy, delete.

She used to laugh about it. Then one evening, she called me crying because a man she actually liked had done the same to her. She could not understand why it hurt so much.

I wanted to tell her it hurt because the heart does not care about the rules we invent. It only knows what it has been taught.

Culture told us we could separate body from soul as cleanly as we separate condom from a veiny penis. We believed it because the alternative felt old-fashioned and hard.

But the body is not a tool you pick up and put down. It carries memory. It carries the imprint of every person who has been inside the most private parts of you.

Those imprints do not disappear just because the person does.

I learned this the hard way. There are nights, even now, when a certain scent or a certain way someone laughs will pull an old face into the room with me.

The past does not always stay in the past when you have invited so many people into your present.

I grew up in church. I know the language of purity. I also know how easy it is to sing on Sunday and forget by Thursday.

For a long time, I treated the spiritual part like background noise. Something for people who were scared of their own desire.

Then, the emptiness started arriving in quieter moments; after the pleasure faded, while brushing my teeth, while stuck in traffic around Yaba axis. It gives me a sense that I had been spending something I did not fully understand.

I am not going to preach doctrine to you. I will only say what I lived.

There is a joining that happens in sex that is deeper than skin. You can feel it, even when you pretend you cannot. When that joining happens again and again with people who are temporary, something in your spirit begins to fray.

It doesn’t always come as loud guilt. Sometimes, it comes as an inability to feel clean. And sometimes, as a restlessness that no new body can settle. Most times, yeah? it comes as a quiet grief for a version of yourself you can no longer reach.

I have knelt beside my bed at 3:03 AM and tried to pray and felt only distance. It’s not like God had left or anything, but I had scattered pieces of myself across so many rooms that I no longer knew how to bring the whole of me into one place.

That is a lonely kind of poverty.

Many of us in this smelly Lagos live with that poverty while posting pictures of owambe, church, work, selfies with our friends and colleagues, mirror selfies etc

We look free, but feel really fragmented.

I will tell you the things I know now that I wish someone had told me with enough force to make me listen.

First, the body keeps the score even when the mind pretends the game is over. Every casual night teaches your nervous system something about attachment.

If the lesson is “open, take, leave,” that lesson becomes the default. When a real relationship finally arrives, your body may still be running the old software.

You will want to run when things get deep. You will find faults that are not really faults. You will sabotage what you say you want because the unfamiliar safety feels more dangerous than the familiar emptiness.

Secondly, you cannot practice temporary intimacy for years and then suddenly become excellent at permanent love. The skills are different. One rewards detachment, and the other requires the courage to stay, when it’s no longer exciting.

I have watched too many people (including myself) discover this only after they had already damaged the ability to stay.

Thirdly, the freedom to choose every night slowly becomes the inability to choose one person for a lifetime.

You are not cursed, but you have trained yourself out of the very capacities that lasting love requires; patience, restraint, the willingness to be fully known, the discipline of directing desire instead of obeying it.

Fourthly [ I don’t know if there’s anything like fourthly ], there is a particular grief that comes from realising you gave your body to people who never asked for your future, and then struggled to give your future to the person who asked for your body.

That grief sits in the chest like a stone. It does not always scream. It just makes everything a little heavier.

I carry that stone. Some days it is quiet. Some days it presses hard.

I’m not celibate as a performanceI and I’m not pure either. I’m simply finished with the version of freedom that left me emptier than it found me.

These days, I move slower. I pay attention to the difference between desire and desperation. I notice when I am reaching for a body because I am lonely, rather than because I have something whole to offer.

I practice saying “no” to nights that would be easy and empty. The “no” still costs me. Sometimes I lie awake and feel the old hunger. But the hunger no longer owns the whole of me.

I look at younger men in Lagos, the ones still collecting nights like trophies, and I feel a complicated mix of recognition and sorrow.

I want to grab them by the shoulder and say, “The choice is real. The consequences are also real. And some of them do not show up until the parties have stopped, and the silence has become permanent.”

I look at the women who have been treated as temporary and I feel anger at the version of myself that once participated in that treatment. I cannot undo those nights. I can only refuse to add more.

I still think about that girl in the short-let at Gbagada Phase II. The weight of her head, the smell of her skin and even how nice her earrings were.

The way she trusted the night enough to fall asleep on me. I never saw her again. I do not even remember her surname.

What I remember is the moment I realised I had turned my own body into a revolving door. People came in. People left. Nothing stayed. And eventually, I began to feel like nothing myself.

My penis is still mine. The choice is still mine.

But I finally understand what the choice is actually between. It’s not between repression and freedom. I would say it’s between a freedom that scatters you, and a freedom that gathers you.

It’s between nights that feel like winning and a life that feels like belonging. I honestly don’t know, but it’s between being available to everyone and being truly available to someone.

I am still learning how to choose the second one. Some days I fail. Most days, I’m simply trying harder than the man who used to say the title of this piece like a punchline.

If you are still living inside that punchline, I am not here to condemn you. I am only here to say the road continues further than the parties suggest. And the further you go, the more the bill and regret arrives.

You can keep choosing the easy nights.
Or you can begin the harder work of becoming someone whose “yes” means something that lasts, just like that my old senior secondary school friend who got married.

Both are choices. Only one of them leaves you whole.

I know, because I have lived the first long enough to recognise the shape of the second. And I am still walking toward it, one careful decision at a time.

Regardless, my penis is still my choice, until marriage.

I left Bariga that evening with the taste of pepper soup still in my mouth and the shape of her mother’s hands on my shoulders.

The bus to campus was half-empty. I sat near the window and watched Lagos slide past, sluggishly, in the late light, but I wasn’t really seeing any of it.

My body felt used in a way that was both ordinary and completely new. I kept replaying the wink, the deliberate bounce, the way she had straightened her skirt like she was finishing a chore that had gone better than expected.

Toyosi texted me that night.

You left early. And the cake was sweeter than expected sha.

I stared at the message for a long time before typing back.

Oh… I had a class… pele.

She replied with a laughing emoji and nothing else. I didn’t sleep well that night… I just lay on the thick mattress in my room, listening to Uche snore, and tried to decide whether I had just crossed a line that could never be uncrossed or whether the line had never existed in the first place.

Uche’s snore was annoying because it sounded like Danfo Bus Engine.

The next morning was Youth’s General Fellowship [YGF] and I went as if nothing had happened.

Toyosi led worship as expected. She closed her eyes and lifted her hands, and her voice cracked on the high notes the way it always did when she meant it.

I watched her and felt the strange, flat knowledge that I had been inside her mother, less than twenty-four hours earlier. The knowledge, or should I call it guilt ? Well… it sat in my chest like a Tilapia bone I had swallowed and could not bring back up.

Damilare was there too. He sat in the front row, nodding, clapping at the right moments. When the meeting ended, he came over and asked if I had enjoyed the party.

I said “yes.” I really enjoyed the party of course. I mean… who wouldn’t?

He smiled the same open, unguarded smile he had given me when he shook my hand the day before. I wanted to tell him everything and I wanted to never see him again.

Instead, I asked about an assignment in one of our courses. He laughed and reminded me that he wasn’t in our department.

The mixture of guilt, shame, and faint anger made me lose focus throughout the entire fellowship.

That week, Toyosi and I did not meet. We just texted in short, careful bursts.

She asked if I was avoiding her, and I lied I was busy with some stuff and few PRDs [ Product Requirement Documents] that some agencies had sent to me.

They wanted to build a prediction engine for their clients in Sweden, and I was the software engineer somebody recommended. I mean, I sabi… so why not?

The lies were soft enough that she didn’t even notice it.

On Thursday evening she called.

“Please, come to Sabo,” she said.

No greeting whatsoever…

“The same place?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a problem? You seem disturbed…”

“TOBE, just come… it’s urgent.”

Omo, I sent Uche my live location in case Toyosi wants to take revenge. I mean, who says “it’s not that deep when you just fucked her mum?”

I got there, with half my heart in my palms. We ate nothing this time. She just parked the car behind the buka, beside an open space, close to a wall with “Post No Bil” write up.

The second “L” in the “Bil” was missing.

The windows of her car were already fogged from the heat of two bodies that had not yet touched. She turned off the engine and looked at me.

“My mum told me you left early,” she said.

I was surprised. Didn’t I tell you I was leaving for class? It was that moment that it occurred to me that she was just looking for a conversation “opener”

“She also told me you were polite.”

I said nothing. The silence stretched until she reached across and put her hand on my thigh, higher than was friendly.

“I already told you I saw you, It’s not that deep. But I need to know something.”

“What?”

“Was she better than me?”

Wait, was this why you made me come all the way to Sabo? You could have just asked on the phone…

The question was so direct it almost made me laugh. I didn’t by the way. I looked at her face in the half-dark space in the car and saw that she was serious, and a little afraid of the answer, also a little aroused by the fact that she was asking it.

“She was different, but…”

“But what? Say it… I’m fucking serious, say it”

“Does she watch porn?”

“So, she was better than me? Huh? Is that where you’re driving at?”

“No… relax. I wasn’t just expecting her to be s..so good at BJs…”

She looked pale all of a sudden. I could literally feel it that she was angry and disappointed at the same time.

“Let me get it straight… she uses her tongue better than me, is that what you’re saying? I need you to talk!”

Ah ah, una dey do competition?

I said that in my mind.

“Toyosi, I never used the word “better” in any of my sentences.”

“I’m not dumb please… that’s literally what you’re insinuating…”

I kept quiet. We both did, and I saw tears dropped from her eyes.

“TOBE, I love you… can’t you see it? Are you this naive? What the hell?”

She just kept crying…

To be honest, I would be lying if I said there was no iota of connection between us. She was prettier than Efe, but not body-wise. She had money, car, intelligence, dark in complexion… and cooking was a breeze for her.

She was literally a pornstar inside the body of a deaconess and a chef.

“What about Damilare?”

“I love him too… I do”

“Wait, you love both of us?”

“Yeah…”

She looked serious, even with tears in her eyes.

It occurred to me that you can actually love two people at the same, the depth of the “love” would definitely differ, but you love two of them.

She nodded as if that was enough. Then she climbed over the gear stick and into my lap the way she had done the first time, and the second, and the third.

The Durex she had claimed were for Sarah came out of the same purse. We both saw it and were quieter than usual.

She just climbed and hugged me tight. I could feel every bit of emotion she was also feeling.

I liked her too. But I have also started liking her mum.

Outside, someone was frying Akara and the smell of hot oil mixed with the smell of her skin.

She stayed on top of me for a while, forehead against mine, breathing the same air.

“You’re going to keep seeing her.

It was not a question. I didn’t answer either… I was just quiet because she wasn’t wrong.

“I do care fr. I can’t deny it anymore. I know I said it’s not that deep, but fuck no. It is… she’s my mum“

“I wanted to tell you to use protection but she can’t get pregnant anymore.”

“Please, don’t tell Damilare or anyone in fellowship. And don’t stop coming when I call you.”

She said all of these crying real tears.

I nodded against her forehead. The list of conditions felt both impossible and completely reasonable.

We stayed like that until the generator at the buka coughed and died, and the sudden quietness made everything feel closer.

That was the week I started smoking with her.

She had a small, folded paper of “Cana” in the glove compartment, next to the spare phone charger and a half-finished packet of mint. We smoked in the car with the windows cracked just enough.

The first time, I coughed until my eyes watered and she laughed the same way she had laughed outside the cybercafé months earlier, hand over her mouth.

The second time it was easier. The third time I understood why she did it. The world softened at the edges, and the guilt I was feeling became something I could look at without flinching.

Fellowship, Damilare, my mother’s phone calls, the boy in 300L I had judged, all of it floated a little farther away.

Weed has a way of making you feel you’re in peace with yourself and the world at large, but it’s deception.

Three days after this whole thing, Toyosi’s mother called me from a number I didn’t recognise.

She had “stolen” my number from her daughter’s phone.

“TOBE,” she said.

Her voice was calm, almost fond. “I need to see you. Now. And alone.”

“Yes Ma”

I didn’t ask why as if I already knew.

She was still in Lagos for another two weeks before returning to Canada.

At the time, it simply felt like a temporary window that both of us decided to use.

The address she sent was that of a big hotel, off Allen Avenue, Ikeja GRA Area, Lagos.

She had intentionally chosen it.

It was on the ground floor, back room, with an air conditioner that was so efficient, unlike the ones I have come across before.

She arrived before me, already changed out of the clothes she had worn.

When I knocked, there was no response. I thought it was the wrong door, so I had to check number again.

“Room 045. It’s correct now…”

She opened the door in a black slip that looked expensive and slightly wrong for the hour of the afternoon.

No greetings at all. I wasn’t even expecting her to greet me. I mean, she was older.. so.

She pulled me inside by the front of my shirt and locked the door with her other hand, almost immediately.

This time, there was no kitchen radio, no thin wall with Damilare’s laughter on the other side. Only the sound of the air conditioner and the occasional car horn from the road.

She was more deliberate than she had been in the kitchen. She made me sit on the edge of the bed while she stood between my knees and undressed me with the same unhurried precision Toyosi used when she picked bones from fish.

She was already so wet.

When she finally climbed onto me, she kept her eyes open the entire time, watching my face the way someone watches a person they are trying to memorise.

“You have no business being this handsome, big and veiny down there. You’re bigger than my husband.”

She started kissing me, slowly, slurpingly and gently. I became harder and somehow, I knew that was her intention. She noticed how hard I was and shifted her pink pants, and kept kissing me.

Her breasts were on my chest as we kissed passionately, like married couples. This time, we both didn’t care about Durex. She slid it in, and gave a soft moan with her eyes seductively displaying only the white part.

She was better than Toyosi, by all means, touches, bounces, rides, twists, twerks and kisses.

I don’t know where the energy came from, but I made her scream. With every form of disrespect, I bent her over, arched her back, slapped her ass, pulled her hair and gave her the best time of her life.

During this, I’d occasionally think about Efe, Folake and Toyosi, especially how Efe made me beg.

Read my previous articles to understand these names.

Veronica, Toyosi’s mum, begged me. I made a 41-year old woman call me “Daddy.”

I didn’t stop at all. I loved how her ass bounced back and how I pulled her hair, even how my upper lip held my lower lip as I was thrusting.

She couldn’t take it anymore and she pulled off and pushed me away, with her legs shaking uncontrollably.

I didn’t let me rest for too long, and I pulled her over again, spread her open like Toyosi, and let my full body weight rest on her as I was thrusting in a missionary.

It was intentional because I know she can’t push me away in that position.

In few minutes while in this position, the whole bed was wet. She was squirting all over and I didn’t give a shit.

The pleasure was too much that she almost cried.

I pulled out and let her rest. I winked at her and smiled…

She managed to sit up, without an iota of shame, even though she was naked, fully naked.

This woman was 41, but her physique was still “on point.” You could tell she prioritizes workout and fitness over her 9 — 5 work.

In that sitting position, she signaled me to come closer and I did. Remember how she used her tongue so well in that kitchen? This was time was much better.

I don’t know… but she made sure to trace and bless every vein on my D, with her tongue that had survived unromantic years in her marriage.

She rubbed my waist, chest and hips as she used her tongue seductively. I’m not a robot… I just couldn’t help it anymore. I splashed over her face, as she swallowed some.

We both came, breathing like athletes, but we didn’t run a single mile. I didn’t pity her, and she didn’t take it easy on me either.

We rested for few minutes, and headed to the bathroom, together.

Water has this re-awakening effect. Immediately we felt the drop of the water from the shower, I arched her back again, with the whole water splash and skin-to-skin contact, we made each other happy for about ten minutes.

I don’t know if she was squirting this time around or it was simply the shower. We came out, fully naked and completely shameless.

“What can I do for you, Daddy?”

She said it intentionally this time, while rubbing my chest.

“Uhmm… in what sense, Ma?”

“Oh please, enough of the formalities. You made me scream, beg and drenched. So, why the formalities again?”

“I should still respect you, Ma”

“There you go again… Ma?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs…”

“Mrs. V sounds better. I am Veronica, by the way.”

“Ohhh, that’s nice, Mrs. V”

“Good boy.”

“Your account number ?”

At this point, I didn’t want money. I wanted her, now and always.

“It’s okay, Mrs. V… you don’t have to.”

She sneered at me. You know what you call “Yinmu”? Yeah… exactly.

I received a notification that says, “NGN400,000.00 has been deposited into your account”

She smiled and said, “I read your chat with my daughter, remember? Yup… I copied some details that I needed”

I didn’t know what to answer, so I said nothing. She came closer and slept on the bed, reached back and found my hand, then placed it on her hip like she was putting something back where it belonged.

“Don’t tell Toyosi the details,” she added. “She already knows enough.”

After some minutes, the room-service called and brought food for us. She already knew that I love Jollof rice, slightly burnt plantain, a lot of eggs, fish, meat and vegetables. This woman actually took time to read my chat with her daughter.

I was trying to be romantic, so I wanted to feed her. You know this “Urgh… what’s this one trying to do?” facial expression? Yeah, she made that face and it kind of reminded me that she wasn’t my mate.

I left first. She stayed behind to shower again. Outside, the late afternoon heat felt thicker than usual. I walked to the bus stop with the distinct sense that my body no longer fully belonged to me.

I kept talking to Mrs. V, another man’s wife and somebody’s mother. She’d randomly send me nudes, selfies, workout videos and lots more.

She didn’t wait until I asked. Somehow, she knew I like my woman being goofy around me and stuff.

“TOBE, I’d be leaving for Canada in two days. Is it possible to assist with packing my bags?”

She was clearly lying. House-helps were there, even the Gate-man, and neighbors. So, why should I help?

“You know your way to the family house, I suppose?”

“Yes Ma…”

“TOBE…”

“Yes, Mrs. V”

“Good boy… enough of the Ma and unnecessary respect please.”

Toyosi was at a departmental meeting and Damilare was somewhere in Yaba buying fabric for a their family friend’s wedding.

The compound was quiet.

I noticed that the gate-man didn’t even interrogate me as expected. She must have told him that somebody is coming over.

I knocked, she opened the door and gave me a warm hug that could melt a stone. It was more respectful this time around. We talked for a while and she offered me a cup of juice…

We were both pretending like we didn’t know what we wanted to do.

“Uhmm… where are the bags I’d be helping with?”

“Ohh… I almost forgot”

You? Almost forgot? You of all people? A whole professor in one of the reputable universities in Ontario?

“It’s in the bedroom.”

I didn’t know where that was, so I asked her to show me. She stood up and walked towards a room, but this time around, I pulled her back.

She pushed me away and said, “Mmhm, not today…”

She seemed serious, with her tired but romantic eyes.

When she looked down and saw how hard I was, she seemed to be having a second thought. I moved closer and gave her a kiss on the neck, and she gave an almost inaudible moan.

I know say Mama sef want am.

We didn’t make it to her matrimonial bedroom. Right in that rear spot, almost away from the center of the parlour, she bent down and I fell on my knees.

I ate her out from behind, and she’d twerk occasionally to let me breathe.

Tell me why I won’t rate her performance over her daughter’s?

She was insanely clean and actually tasted good as I ate.

I’d smack her fat ass from time to time, and she’d hold the wall to maintain posture. I was dripping too and I couldn’t help it.

“What are you waiting for? Let me have it please”

As I put it in, she was moaning moderately, but the gate-man could hear it. The house was built in a way that would allow you have a 270 degree view of the whole compound, down to the gate-man house.

We lasted for about 20 minutes and then went inside.

I didn’t see any bag that would be packed. Just a very big aesthetic bedroom with RnB music playing slowlyyy.

I couldn’t get enough of her that day. I moved closer and wanted to eat her out again.

“That’s the last one,” she said.

I nodded. But in my mind, I loudly said, “last one as how?”

We had fun for over an hour and she walked me to the gate herself. I wanted to go into details, but you’d see me differently. What we really did should remain between us.

At the threshold, she touched my face once, briefly, the way a person touches something they are about to leave behind.

“Be careful with my daughter,” she said. “She’s more fragile than she pretends.”

Then she closed the gate, smacked her ass, winked and said, “byeeee”

I stood on the other side for a few seconds longer than necessary, listening to her footsteps retreat into the house.

Somewhere in the distance, a generator started up. The sound was nowhere identical to the one from the night NEPA took light, and Toyosi and I had kept talking in the dark on opposite ends of campus.

You must have heard of a MEKANO Gen, yeah?

I turned and walked toward the main road and I never saw Toyosi’s mother again after that afternoon.

She returned to Canada on a Tuesday. Toyosi mentioned it in passing during a phone call, the same flat, unbothered voice she used for things already decided.

I said “safe journey” like a person who had no reason to care beyond politeness. The words felt strange in my mouth. I knew she was traveling…

I kept talking to Mrs. V and feelings actually grew. It sounds weird but it did. She’d tell me things she wouldn’t tell her daughter or husband.

Money was not a problem for her, and of course, it extended to me too. She knew I was into tech and to my surprise, she shipped a Mac to me during my birthday.

I could be in class and a random alert of NGN500,000.00 would peck my OPAY, followed by 13 pictures of Mrs. V in the bathroom, office, kitchen etc.

I wish I never did all these, but yeah, it’s not that deep, yeah?

I remember this experience clearly because she owed me NGN120,000.00 and never paid back.

I don’t know why that’s the detail that survived best, out of everything else that happened that year.

I’ve tried to remember the actual important things in order; how we met, what she said, what I said back, but they come to me out of sequence, scrambled, like a deck someone shuffled badly.

But the NGN120,000.00 is sharp, walai.

According to her, it was used it treating her mother. And she said she’d send it back on Monday.

It’s a lie. Her mother was in Canada that time.

I think about that sometimes and laugh at myself, because out of everything that happened between us, that’s the one debt I still occasionally remember with something close to erection, instead of irritation or anger.

Toyosi led the choir. I should probably say that earlier, but I’m not going to bother arranging this properly.

She led the choir, and she was also, unfortunately for me, the reason I got into a stupid argument with my roommate, Uche, about whether it was appropriate to clap during offering or only during praise and worship.

Uche thought clapping during offering was “carnal.” I didn’t actually care.

I just wanted an excuse to keep talking about fellowship, because “fellowship”, that semester, had become a word that meant her; Toyosi.

Don’t judge me, but I want to tell you something before I go further. Two months before any of this started, I stood up during a fellowship discussion and made a comment about a guy in 300L who’d been “backsliding.”

That was the word we used, backsliding, as if faith was a hill and he’d simply lost his footing on it. I didn’t know the full story.

I said something about discipline that evening, about how faith that isn’t tested in private isn’t real faith. People nodded, and I felt good saying it, as if my own faith had been tested over and over.

Toyosi was the fellowship President.

We didn’t even meet the way I’ve told people we met, when I’ve told this story badly at parties, drunk enough to make it funny.

I usually say our eyes met during worship, which is a lie, or at least an exaggeration dressed as memory.

What actually happened was that she asked for my class notes because she’d missed one week of Insulin Pathways in CBG 211, and Bukola, who sat next to her, told her I always wrote everything down properly.

That’s it. That’s the beginning. I swear, it was just about class notes.

I photocopied them at the Cybercafe in Jaja Complex, directly opposite Jaja Hostel, close to the Zenith Bank on UNILAG campus, the one with the generator that made the whole shop smell like fuel.

She met me there to collect them, and we stood outside for 15 minutes, talking about one of our semi-satanic lecturers, who owns a motor instead of a car.

I don’t remember a single word either of us said, except that she laughed at something and covered her mouth the way people do when they think their laugh is too loud for wherever they are.

I’m telling you this out of order on purpose, sort of, because that’s genuinely how I remember it. There’s a gap, weeks of gap, where I know things happened, especially at the backseat of her car, but I can’t fully account for the order they happened in.

I know we started talking more. At some point, I stopped being annoyed that she never paid back the money, and started being the kind of annoyed that’s actually just wanting an excuse to text someone.

My mother called me in the middle of one of our conversations once, and I remember being angry about it.

There’s this specific irrational anger you feel toward your own mother for calling at a bad time, not knowing it was a bad time, not even knowing anything, just wanting to know if I’d submitted an important report to the committee.

Toyosi asked who it was. I said nobody important, and I remember, even then, some small part of me registering that as a strange thing to have said about my own mother, and not thinking about it again for a long time after.

When I’ve told this story to one of my exes, with a libido as high as the UBA building at Marina, Lagos, I made her [ Toyosi ] sound like a plot twist; a good girl, prayerful , quiet and one who lived a secret life.

It wasn’t like that, if I’m being honest. She was competitive about spiritual things in a way that used to genuinely irritate me.

She’d get quietly annoyed if someone else was asked to pray during a meeting instead of her, and then two minutes later, she’d be completely sincere, leading a worship session, crying actual tears during a song, and I never fully worked out how both of those things lived in the same person without her seeming fake, because she didn’t actually seem fake.

She seemed like someone I was watching try to hold something together that kept slipping in places she wasn’t fully aware were slipping, just the way my di…

I found out about the smoking because she told me, not because I caught her. I don’t think Toyosi is somebody you can even catch doing anything bad.

She told me over the phone, almost bored, like she was telling me she’d missed a lecture.

“I smoke sometimes sha. Don’t tell anyone.”

I said, “Mhmm, naso.” I didn’t ask why, because I didn’t even believe her.

Why fellowship president go dey smoke, I thought, and continued flipping my CBG 211 notes.

“You don’t believe me, right?”, She asked.

“Me ke? Who am I to doubt the anointed one?”, I replied.

“Anointed sounds good. You should anoint me one of these days off campus, preferably in a hotel.” She said.

“Aunty, if you don’t have what to say, I want to continue reading. Anoint you as how? Do I look like God?”, I said; but deep down, I really wanted to oil Toyosi up.

“But you were made in His image and likeness”. She continued.

“Wait, are you actually like this? How did you become the President? What the fuck?” I replied. But the demon in me were smiling mischievously.

“Oh please… don’t even judge me. You talk like you didn’t enjoy…You know what? Get the fuck off my phone…Mtcheww.” She replied and hung up.

I called her back and apologized. I knew she was angry about what I said.

“I’d accept your apology on one condition.” She requested.

“Bami soro, my love…” I said.

“TOBE, just shut it. Who’s your love?” She snapped.

“I’m sorry, mabinu… aye o le to yen”, I told her.

“You’re going to oil me up or not? It’s a Yes or No question” She asked.

“Toyosi… are you serious? Like, oil you up? Why are you saying this? What happened to Colossians 4:6?”

“You know what? Never mind. Forget I ever said anything. I’m actually ovulating…”

“Have a good day if it’s necessary, Saint TOBE.” She hung up again.

If I’m honest, some part of me was relieved, because it gave me something to hold on to, as I stood in my room, smiling at the wall, with two hands on my waist.

You know the way Nigerian fathers would stand and smile when they’ve just gotten a good NEWS?

Remember how I talked about discipline like I understood the first thing about it? Shame!

I thought about everything that just happened over the call. I didn’t understand, then, what the smoking was actually for.

I thought it was a private habit, or something she managed alone, on her own terms, unrelated to anything happening between us.

I understand it differently now, looking back with whatever clarity distance eventually gives you. There was always some form of weed involved, especially “Cana.”

I didn’t put this together until today, because a guy was slapped right in my presence for not making a transfer of NGN500 at the Pharmacy. It made me remember the debt I mentioned earlier and now, you’re reading about the full experience.

There was a night and I can’t remember which night exactly, but I remember the details around it clearly, where NEPA took light halfway through another phone call, and instead of hanging up, we just kept talking in the dark, both of us, on our separate ends of a campus.

That same night had gone completely quiet except for one generator somewhere far off, sounding like a small, tired animal.

That’s the night I think about the most in this story, if I’m forced to pick one, because it was the first time the conversation felt like it belonged only to us, in a way that didn’t need fellowship or class notes or anything as an excuse anymore.

I should say clearly that she pursued a lot of what happened after that. I don’t say this to shift anything onto her, because I don’t think blame is actually the point of telling this story.

I’ve let myself, in past retellings, sound more passive than I actually was, and I think she’s been made to sound more responsible than she actually was too, and neither of those is fair.

She was the one who suggested, eventually, that we meet somewhere off campus, a place near Sabo where nobody from fellowship would recognize either of us.

I agreed immediately. I even bought Durex condoms, just in case.

There was no hesitation on my end worth mentioning. I agreed without even knowing exactly why we’d be meeting, though if I’m honest, ever since that afternoon at the cybercafe, some part of me had already known.

We ate Amala at a Buka with plastic chairs and a woman who called everyone “my customer” regardless of how many times she’d actually served them before.

Toyosi picked bones out of the fish with a precision that seemed unrelated to everything else happening between us, and I remember thinking, watching her do that, a completely ordinary thought, nothing profound in it.

Maybe she’s really particular about her food.

That’s the whole thought. I don’t know why it’s stayed with me this clearly when so much else hasn’t.

We finished eating, took pictures and left. When we got to where her car was parked, a pack of Durex slipped out of her purse as she was trying to take out the car key.

“…so, this girl had the same motive as me. No wahala sha, great minds think alike.” I said this inside my warm heart.

“TOBE, it’s not what you think. It’s for Sarah, my fair roomate.” She gave an explanation I didn’t need.

“What’s that?” I pretended as if I didn’t see anything.

“You didn’t see it? I hate it when you pretend. TOBE it’s irritating for goodness sake.”

“I swear, I didn’t see anything. What are you talking about? I was almost at your back and I wasn’t paying full attention.” I lied with full confidence.

“I’m sorry… let’s go.” She apologized and I nodded.

There’s a detail I have been avoiding. Toyosi had a boyfriend, who was the fellowship secretary for a totally different department. They met at RCCG camp five months ago.

Damilare was a bit taller than me, but he was skinnier. He always wore a sleeve shirt, “shinos” and leather slides.

He was, by every account I ever heard, including hers, genuinely good to her. He knew about me the way you know about weather in another city; aware something existed, not close enough to feel it.

I met him twice before that year ended. Both times, he shook my hand like a man with nothing to be suspicious of, because he had no reason yet to be.

His birthday fell on a Saturday in that same semester. I wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Toyosi told me, days before, in the particular flat, unbothered voice she used for things she’d already decided, that I should come.

She said there’d be enough people, Damilare’s cousins would be catering for the food and there’d be more than enough for everyone. I told her that sounded like an insane idea. I went anyway.

I don’t fully understand, even now, what either of us thought we were doing, walking into that compound in Bariga, balloons taped crookedly along a fence, and a speaker somebody’s cousin had rigged up too loud for the size of the compound.

I remember greeting Damilare directly, shaking his hand again, telling him happy birthday, watching him thank me with the specific warmth of a man genuinely glad more people had shown up to celebrate him, in Toyosi’s house.

I also remember feeling something in my chest that I want to call guilt [ because I had fucked Toyosi at the backseat of her car thrice. Now you understand why she had the gut to beg me to oil her up ].

The afternoon stretched. People kept arriving. A cousin brought more drinks. The music got louder. I kept thinking I would leave. I didn’t.

Toyosi found me near the back, close to the kitchen, just an hour or so into the party, when the music had gotten loud enough that nobody would notice two people stepping away from a crowd that was mostly occupied with itself.

I don’t remember deciding to follow her, but I remember the kitchen being smaller than I expected, a single convex-shaped bulb, the smell of pepper soup still sitting heavy in the air, a radio somewhere outside the window playing gospel highlife loud enough to cover almost anything.

I was rinsing a plate at the sink and I heard a quiet click from the kitchen door; it was obvious that somebody had entered and closed it.

“This one you’re entering like a thief in the night, hope all is well sha?”

I didn’t hear any response. I thought the door closed by itself until I turned.

“Ah ah, TOBE… you’re washing by yourself?”

“Yes Ma”, I said. It was Toyosi’s mum.

She watched me the entire time, eyes steady, like she was waiting for the exact moment I’d read her body language.

“TOBE…”

“Yes Ma”, I said, while slightly tilting my head forward, and bending a little bit, the respectful way you’d greet a Yoruba woman.

“You’ve been sleeping with my daughter” She said.

My heart left my chest, and this sudden sweat covered my forehead. The floor didn’t feel like one at that moment. There’s this feeling you get when there’s no enough blood flow to a particular part of your body.

“I…I…Ye-s, N.. N.. No Ma.” I stammered as if I had an injured tongue.

“Don’t you dare lie to me. I read your chat the last time Toyosi came back home and I have evidences.”

“I’m sorry Ma”, I said.

That was the only reasonable thing to say at that moment. What do I want to deny? The sex at the car’s backseat that happened more than once? The chats? What exactly?

What happened next was not gentle and it was not slow.

She walked towards me, and said:

“Both of you are adults. Please be careful with her. Don’t get her pregnant. I give her some packs of Durex condoms whenever she’s returning back to school.”

Sarah was was innocent. You gerrit?

She stopped and kept staring at me, with her hands folded. Then she moved closer and patted my shoulders.

She was about to leave, but turned back and said:

“I should have a taste of you, you know…”

I thought I had developed psychosis. What the fuck did I just hear? You want to fuck the same guy your daughter is fucking? Hell no.

Before I know what was happening, because I was still in shock and fear, my D was already in her mouth. And the kitchen door was locked this time around.

You dare NOT judge me. But to be honest, it was the best BJ I ever received, even till now. Like, who taught this 41 year old woman this game?

I was trying to process the whole scenario, before she brought out Kiss condom, and slowly wrapped it around my D, pulled me closer, then turned and let me thrust from behind.

This woman understood the assignment. Her motion were effortlessly smooth and steady, with deliberate bounces here and there, as she turns once in a while to wink at me.

I was having “fun”, panicking and in serious disbelief at the same thing. She’d smile during the act, and twerk a bit.

Somewhere on the other side of the thin wall, less than thirty feet away, Damilare was accepting a toast from his cousins. I could hear the laughter and the clink of bottles. My hands were not steady. Neither were hers.

We finished. She straightened her skirt and I pulled my trousers back up, unlocked the door, and we walked out separately, five minutes apart.

I left before the cake was cut. I told Toyosi I had an early class. She nodded like she believed me, or like she’d already stopped needing to.

I judged the guy in 300L for something I ended up doing myself, worse, for longer, with more deliberate hiding involved, and eventually, in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, at a party that wasn’t mine either, with a level of disregard for another man’s wife that I still don’t have a comfortable word for.

I never apologized to them, really; the boy from 300L or Damilare, or Toyosi or even her Dad [ I don’t want to die young ], though the second apology would have required admitting something I’ve still never said out loud to anyone until writing this down now.

I told Toyosi about it eventually. And she said, “I know.”

You know I fucked your mum? How? She looked at me as if she heard what I said within.

“Yeah, I know… I saw you guys through the back door when I went to carry the last cake. But it’s not that deep abeg. At least you enjoyed it.”

Anticipate Episode II.

I want to tell you about the night I found out I wasn't the man I thought I was.

Not the villain version of that sentence. The quieter, more embarrassing version; the one where you discover you've spent years performing a kind of goodness you never actually finished building all the way down to the foundation.

Before I tell you about that night, I need to tell you about an earlier one, because I don't think the first makes any sense without it.

I was maybe 11 years old, in my uncle's compound, watching him fix a generator with two of his friends standing around offering opinions he clearly didn't want.

At some point, frustrated, he handed the wrench to one of the younger men in the group and said, half-joking, half-not,

"Since you know book, come and show us now."

The younger man fumbled with it for a minute, got something wrong, and his index finger got hooked in and the man begged with a sharp shout.

My uncle laughed, not cruelly, exactly, but in a way that landed somewhere permanent in the room.

"This one no sabi anything" he said, and everyone laughed along, and the younger man laughed too, the specific laugh you give when you're covering for something that actually stung.

I didn't think about that moment again for almost 14 years. But I think about it constantly now, because I've come to believe it taught me something I never consciously learned, the way the most durable lessons usually arrive; sideways, disguised as a joke, absorbed by a child who wasn't even the one being laughed at, but who understood, immediately and completely, exactly what he needed to avoid becoming.

Don't be the man who begs. Don't be the man other men have to explain something to, twice. Whatever you do, don't be caught fumbling with the wrench in front of an audience.

I carried that lesson everywhere, disguised in a hundred different outfits, for the rest of my life, without ever once tracing it back to a Saturday afternoon generator repair in my uncle's compound.

I want you to hold onto that memory, because it's going to matter again later, in a room that has nothing to do with generators at all.

Now, the actual night.

Her name was Efe. I met her at a mutual friend's dinner in Lekki, one of those small gatherings where everyone's slightly too dressed up for the actual size of the apartment.

She was an architect, sharp in the specific way people are sharp when they've had to fight for every inch of a room dominated by men, who assumed they knew more than her.

I watched her, early in the evening, correct a structural claim a much older man had made with total confidence, doing it so gently he didn't even realize, until several minutes later, that he'd been wrong the entire time and she'd simply let him arrive there himself instead of embarrassing him publicly.

I liked that about her immediately. I liked, even more, that she noticed me noticing, and gave me a small, knowing and seductive wink, across the room that felt like the beginning of a conversation neither of us had started out loud yet.

We ended up in the kitchen later that night, both of us escaping a conversation about cryptocurrency neither of us cared about, and talked for forty minutes about nothing that mattered and everything that did.

You know… her frustration with clients who second-guessed her competence, my own complicated relationship with C++ programming language, which taught me patience instead of syntax.

She asked good questions. She actually waited for the answers instead of using the silence to plan her next sentence, the way most conversations at parties like that usually go.

We met again the following week, in Lagos W-bar. We ordered two glasses of Drostdy-Hof ( The Extra Light White one ), which later turned into a thirty-minute walk along the bar’s wide cozy entrance.

Both of us were pretending we had somewhere else to be, so neither of us had to admit we didn't want the afternoon to end.

I told her things I hadn't told people I'd known for years, that I sometimes wondered if the version of myself I presented publicly, calm, self-aware, evolved, was actually load-bearing, or whether it would collapse the moment something tested it properly.

She laughed and said, "Everyone's performing something. The question is just whether you know which parts are real."

I didn't have a good answer for that. I think, looking back, some part of me already suspected I wouldn't like finding out.

For weeks after that, we talked constantly; real nasty conversations between adults. Some midnight conversations had me adjusting my undies, in a way that tells my penis to relax.

And for some conversation, you’d mostly find me grinning from ear to ear, my legs against the wall of my room as I lie in bed, with this constant licking of the lips as if I was lubricating some of the lies I told her.

I want you to understand something about me before I go further into what actually happened, because it matters for everything that comes after. I have spent years being the man who calls out other men. The one who leaves the group chat when the jokes get ugly.

You know…the one who's read enough, listened enough, sat with enough uncomfortable conversations about patriarchy and privileges that I genuinely believed I'd graduated from whatever version of masculinity does damage.

I wasn't performing that belief. I actually held it, the way you hold a fact you've checked and rechecked and never found reason to doubt. That's what makes what happened later so difficult to admit, even now, months afterward, writing this down for the first time.

By the time we finally ended up at her apartment one Friday night, rain coming down outside the way it always seems to, in the stories people actually remember, I felt something I want to call safety, because that's the closest word I have for it.

Safety, and an anticipation so specific it had a texture, sitting low in my chest the entire drive over. You know the kind of anticipation that comes not just from wanting someone, but from wanting to be fully present with someone you've already decided matters? Exactly!

I'm going to walk you through every detail of what happened once we were actually together because why not?

When Efe opened the door, the room had this warm aesthetic “hug” it gives the moment you walk in, even when the AC hummed low against the Lagos heat outside.

Soft amber light spilled from a single paper lantern in the corner, catching on the slow curl of smoke rising from the incense stick. It had this sandalwood scent, and something darker, richer, like crushed black pepper and warm skin.

The air itself felt thickened, almost syrupy, carrying the faint sweetness of ripe mango and the deeper, muskier note of whatever oil she’d warmed earlier.

She cat-walked gently, knowing fully well that I was behind her.

I wish I wasn’t the one telling you this, but Efe is like a goddess of some rivers. I think I should describe her body for you.

She has a body and a face that stops you cold. Her dimples were as deep as your navel hole. Her skin is deep brown and smooth, almost glowing under soft light. It looks warm and soft. It’s the type you want to run your hands over for a long time.

Her shoulders are strong but soft. They lead down to full, heavy breasts that sits with pride, high and round. They bounce a little when she walks and fill your hands completely. Her nipples are dark and get hard easily.

Her waist? My God, it’s narrow, then her hips get wide and thick. Those hips literally roll when she moves, slow and heavy, like they’re made to pull you in.

Her thighs are big and soft, and they do not press together when she stands. Yes, she was that fit. Now, imagine that kind of woman cat-walking.

Between them is a full, soft pussy with dark curls, already looking wet and ready.

Her ass is big, round, and a bit high. It jiggles when she walks and fills both hands when you grab it. The skin there is smooth and warm, and the curve under each cheek is thick enough to make your mouth water.

Even her arms and legs look soft, long and strong at the same time. You can tell she uses the gym often.

Everything about her body is full and soft where it should be, firm where it counts. But she has really small ears. Does that even matter? I guess not!

Looking at her makes your pulse drop straight down. But touching her? It feels like sinking into warm, living silk.

She walked towards her bed and sat.

Efe’s gaze had this “come here baby” kind of look. She didn’t speak. She only looked at me the way a person looks at something they fully intend to devour.

I pushed the door and it made this click sound that modern doors mame. The “hug” of the room tightened.

No matter the atmosphere, consent is a big one for me. I stood there, licking my lips and caressing her body with my own eyes.

“Give me a minute. Let me freshen up, or would you like to join me?”

That single statement slapped the nerves around my penis, and my heart jumped. I mean, I have seen many women my whole life, but none compared to this type of physique.

“Uhmm… don’t worry. Take your time… I’d use the guest bathroom.”

Guest bathroom? Am I mad? Did that nonsense just come out of my mouth?

“Sure, but don’t spend the eternity there.” She said this with a wink.

The guest bathroom is almost close to her own room, just a few steps away. I went in and freshened up, but crazy scenarios were playing out in my head.

When I came out, she was already out and sat on the bed, with those thick thighs crossed over each other.

When I walked in with my towel ( I wasn’t expecting her to be done already), she stood up, and her velvet night wear slipped further.

When he came closer, her perfume grew stronger. I could tell she used Guerlain – Shalima; a classic vanilla, iris, incense, and warm oriental notes. Deep, rich, and unapologetically erotic. Old-school sex appeal.

I have worked for a perfume brand before.

At this point, the distance between us was almost the same distance between your two eyes. I couldn’t help it anymore. Efe looked down at my towel, slowly looked up and straight into my eyes.

Her soft hands already on my bare chest. She rubbed for about 10 seconds and my whole body was on fire. I lowered my hands to her ass and smacked it. She made this “Urgh” sound while still looking at me, with her lurking sleepy eyes.

I kissed her neck, licked a bit too. My hands were still caressing and gently smacking her ass. She gently raised her right leg to my waist line and I grabbed it. I kissed, licked and blessed her neck, slowly to her heavy breasts.

My towel had fallen off. I kissed her passionately, like I have been waiting all my life to do so. It was a slurpy French kiss that lasted for 3/5 minutes.

Efe did something to me that night. She fell on her knees, and while I was standing, she looked up, straight to my eyes and said:

“Hmmm… such a big boy.”

Before I could respond to that, I was already humming low in my throat, soft mmms turning into deeper ohhhs…

She looked at me again and said:

“Shhhh..”

That was pure torture, but at least the torturing “tool” was her soft wet tongue. She “punished” me for almost seven minutes, different tongue rolls, positions, flickers, licks, sucks and eye contact.

She stood up again, giggled and sat on the bed, with her legs spread evenly. Even a blind man understood that body language at that moment.

Her velvet dress had married the floor, just like my towel.

Dear reader, my eyes beheld a well sculpted work of art. I didn’t know when my knees grabbed the tiles. It was as if her gaze were controlling my entire body and mind.

I buried my tongue deep down, about 3.2cm into her pink meat, tasting how hot and wet she already was.

Her “lips” parted around my mouth as I pushed deeper, slow and steady, letting the soft, slick walls close around my tongue. She was dripping, the taste thick and slightly sweet, coating me as I licked upward and found her clit with the flat of my tongue. A low, shaky “mmm…” left her throat the moment I started moving, curling and pressing deeper while my hands held her thighs open.

“Uhmm… yes, TOBE… ”, she whispered as she rubbed my head like a child.

I blessed her for almost twelve minutes, if not fifteen. I had my bathe, but believe me, another spring of warm ocean washed my face within this twelve/fifteen minute as she moaned.

Her favorite pet was a dog called “Max.”

She dropped onto her hands and knees like Max in that heat; back deeply arched, ass raised high and spread open for me.

I locked my hands around her full hips and thrust into her from behind in, sinking every thick inch deep inside her dripping heat. She moaned low and pushed back hard, meeting every stroke with wet, greedy clap backs of her hips and ass, her pink meat gripping me tight, as the soft slap of skin and moans filled the room.

I liked how she called me “Daddy” during this little sexercise. But I noticed something…

Efe like to be in control, just like how she loved to thrive in male dominated field like Architecture.

After another fifteen minutes, she made me sit on the chair nearby, right next to the soft glow of the classy lantern resting on the low cupboard.

She climbed onto my lap the way a child might sit on an adult in a public bus, but instead of facing forward, she turned to face me completely.

Her knees settled on either side of my hips, and she stretched her legs back behind me, wrapping them around my waist so her ankles locked at the small of my back.

In that position, she sank down slowly, taking me deep inside her while her full breasts pressed against my chest. Her arms slid around my neck, pulling our faces close.

Every small movement of her hips rolled her wet heat tightly around my D, the warm lantern light flickering over the soft bounce of her body as she began to ride me in slow, deep circles.

I wish I was lying, but I begged Efe to stop. Like, literally.

“Oh shit. Hold on, my love… I’m about to cum.”

She didn’t stop. She just kept moaning and bouncing, making a full grown man like me beg for my own freedom. If I’m not mistaken, this lasted for almost thirty minutes.

Efe ruined my masculinity that very night.

She got tired and released me. Both of us panting, with full body sweat, as if the AC was faulty.

“The night is still long, and I want every part of you”, Efe said.

“Huh? You don’t get tired? This girl took something. Nobody can tell me otherwise.” I soliloquized.

The warm aesthetic hug of the room closed around us completely as she drew me down onto the bed, again.

It started well. It felt, for the second stretch of it, like everything the weeks of conversation had promised; attentive, unhurried, genuinely present in a way I was proud of, the way I'd always imagined myself being with someone I actually respected.

And then, gently, without any edge to it at all, she guided my hand somewhere slightly different, and said, quietly, "I want the tip a little slower here."

Eight words. Delivered kindly. Not a complaint. Not even really feedback in the way you'd flinch at feedback from a boss. Just information, offered the way you'd tell someone the light switch is actually on the other wall.

I didn't say anything. I adjusted, outwardly, the way a well-trained man adjusts.

I laid her on her back and settled between her open thighs, and supported her neck with a pillow, and she maintained eye contact with me.

She wrapped her legs around my waist as I pushed into her, slow and deep, her full breasts pressing soft against my 3D chest. I moved in long, steady strokes, filling her completely while her wet heat gripped me tight.

Every thrust was almost against her clit. Her thick thighs pulling me deeper, soft moans spilling from her lips as she grabbed the sheets, and our bodies met in a steady, intimate rhythm.

The rest of the night was good, genuinely good, and I want to be honest about that, even though I begged a woman to take it easy during the first scretch.

We talked for a while, as I caress her hair and cheek.

“I’m happy I made you beg. That was my plan all along.”

Once again, Efe ruined my masculinity that very night.

I don't want this story to sound like a disaster. It wasn't. It was two people, mostly present with each other, with one small “begging” running underneath the whole thing that I couldn't see clearly yet.

I didn't sleep much that night, lying next to her while she slept easily, her breathing slow and unbothered, completely unaware of the quiet argument happening in my head a few inches away from her.

I talked to Efe every single day, and she’d tease me about what happened. But I was determined to take a revenge.

As you’re reading this, just know that I didn’t win this time around. Efe made me beg again, this time, with her tongue, on another Saturday night.

She’s now in Abuja, waking up to the daily routine that comes with NYSC. We still talk, almost every day, and she’d tell me about how she planned to relocate after services.

I asked if there’s now a man in her life, and she said “Why not? I want to look at him again like I did while in Lagos, and make him beg me once more.”

My eyes dilated a little, and she noticed. She smiled and said “Byeee… I’d talk to you later.”

I don't know your name yet, your nationality, skin colour, religion, political views, eye colour, hair texture etc. But I wrote this at the age of 25, without the help of Artificial Intelligence.

I don't know your face, how you laugh, the way you take your tea, or what you do when you're afraid and don't want anyone to see.

I don't know if we've already crossed paths somewhere, in Tejuosho Market at Yaba, in traffic around Victoria Island, on UNILAG campus, at MFM church, maybe at CCI church, Hackerthon, across the street, at a party neither of us wanted to attend, and simply didn't notice each other yet, or even on this Substack app, if it’ll still be called Substack.

I don't know anything certain about you at all. And that makes it even better.

But I know some things about the man writing this to you. I think you deserve those things before you get the rest of me, especially breakfast in bed. Of course, I’m a good cook.

I want to start with the truth, because I think you'll find out anyway, eventually, and I'd rather you hear it from me first, in my own words, before life hands you a version of it that isn't quite complete.

I have not always been a man worth marrying. I want to say that plainly, without softening it. There were seasons where I was angry more than I needed to be.

Seasons where I confused motion for progress, where I looked busy and called it purpose, where I avoided the harder, quieter work of actually thinking something all the way through, because thinking hurts more than moving did. Well, not hurts per se, it’s just more difficult to think.

I was, for a long time, a man who mistook confidence for understanding. I nodded along in rooms I didn't fully belong in yet. I built a version of myself that looked finished from the outside, long before the inside had caught up to match it.

I tell you this first because I don't want you to fall in love with a performance. I want you to fall in love with the man underneath it, the one who's still building, still learning, still occasionally getting it wrong in ways I'm not proud of.

Let me tell you about my father.

He died on the 13th of October, 2021, 3:17 PM in the afternoon, Enugu State. I remember the exact time the way you remember the exact moment a bone breaks, not because you chose to, but because your body decided that moment was too important to let go of, whether you wanted to carry it or not.

Before he died, I prayed for him the way I'd prayed for anything in my life. I had friends who were pastors, real ones, not just churchgoers. We stood together, believing, the way you believe when you haven't yet learned that belief doesn't always get the ending you're asking for.

He died anyway. I will tell you his name when we meet.

I won't pretend that didn't break something in me. It did. I stopped going to church not long after. I started asking questions I'd spent my whole life avoiding, because avoiding them had always felt safer than facing what the answers might actually be.

I am still, some days, standing in the middle of those questions. I don't know if I'll ever fully find my way out of them, or if I even want to anymore, or if the questions themselves became a kind of faith of their own, just a quieter, less certain one.

I tell you this because I think you deserve a man who's honest about where he actually stands, not one performing certainty he doesn't feel just to make you comfortable.

If you ask me, someday, whether I believe in GOD, I might not give you a clean answer. I might just tell you the truth; that I'm still asking, still turning it over, still not finished with the question.

I hope that's enough for you. I hope you're someone who can sit in an unfinished question with me, instead of needing it resolved before you'll stay.

There's something else you should know.

A few years after my father died, right as I was quietly, carefully starting to trust GOD again, I lost my best friend too. I will tell you his name when we meet.

The night before he died, we talked together the way we always did on WhatsApp [ it was a green lightweight application for conversation. I hope it’ll still be called WhatsApp in the future ].

We talked about the campus election. About school. About the life we were both convinced we were going to build, side by side, the way you talk when you fully expect to still be having that same conversation twenty years later.

We made plans. Real ones. The kind you make with someone because you cannot imagine a version of your future that doesn't include them in it. We even talked about the type of women we’d marry.

He died the next day; 28th of January, 2025.

I don't have words for what that did to me. I'm not sure words exist for something like that.

I just know that I was learning, slowly, painfully, how to trust GOD again, and life took the ground out, from under me a second time, right as I was starting to stand on it.

I'm telling you this not to make you sad. I'm telling you because I think grief has shaped how I love more than almost anything else has.

I don't take people for granted the way I might have before. I don't assume there's always more time. When I love someone, I try to actually say it [ just the way I’m writing this letter to you because I surely love you], out loud, plainly, instead of letting it sit unspoken, saved for some later date I've learned, the hard way, is never actually guaranteed to come.

I hope you'll understand, one day, why I hold on to people the way I do. Why I check on the ones I love more than most people think is necessary.

Why I say thank you out loud, specifically, instead of assuming it's understood. Well, It's not anxiety. It's memory and experiences.

I know now what it costs to assume there's always more time.

I want to tell you about work too, because it's a real part of who I am, not just something I do between the parts of life that matter more.

I build important things. I've built an agency out of almost nothing. You know… cold emails nobody answered for months, pitches I rehearsed alone until the words stopped sounding like mine, a client list so small I could remember all of it without writing it down.

I've sat in boardrooms in a suit that fit my body better than it fit my confidence, closing deals while some quiet voice in my chest insisted I was one hard question away from being found out completely.

I still carry some of that voice. I don't think it ever fully leaves. I've just learned, slowly, to stop believing it's telling me the truth.

I think you should know that about me too; that the version of me you'll meet in public, steady and sure of himself, is standing directly on top of doubts I rarely show anyone.

I've spent years learning to build real things anyway, in spite of that doubt, not because it ever fully went away.

My love, I have ruined strategic relationships too. Not on purpose. Some mistakes are just too expensive to fix, so you have to let go and live with the lessons all your life.

I had people in high authorities, business owners, CEOs and others. But I didn’t learn the dynamics of relationships, especially when money was involved.

If you marry me, you're not marrying a man without life lessons or scars or fear. You're marrying a man who's learned to keep building even while afraid, which I've come to believe matters more than fear disappearing ever could. You’re marrying a man who has made enough mistakes early in life, and have learned from them.

I want to build things that outlive me. I think about that more than I probably should, for a man who hasn't even met you yet.

I don't want to just make money, even though I have made a lot of them at this age and wasted them. I want to build something that still stands after I'm gone, the way a bridge stands, the way a well-built house shelters people who never met the man who designed it.

I don't know exactly what that will look like by the time I'm 88 years old [ this is the age I will die, by the way ].

I just know I want my life to leave something behind that doesn't need my name attached to it to still matter.

I hope you'll want that too, in your own way. I hope we'll build something together that outlasts both of us, not just those three children, though I hope for that too, but something less obvious.

A home people actually want to sit in. A marriage other people quietly study because it looks like something worth having. A family that survives hard seasons instead of just surviving good ones.

I should tell you about women I loved before you, because I think you deserve to know I've already failed at this once, and I'd rather you hear the shape of that failure from me directly.

She was really nice to me. Even cooked for me. Supported me in different expected and unexpected ways, encouraged me to keep going. She was the first woman I had sex with, and I can remember clearly that night, how she actually cried for losing what matters to her the most, after GOD & her family; her virginity.

I didn’t cry, but I felt guilty for no reason. I mean, consent was given, but both of us felt like we just did something really evil, at exactly 1:56 AM, Tuesday morning.

I think sex is kind of spiritual because the bond between us grew stronger after that. Honestly, I didn’t find any other woman attractive. I just look at them and feel nothing. Months went by and our love grew stronger.

But…

Along the line, we started noticing cracks in each other’s upbringing, value systems, lifestyles, money management skills, daily habits etc. I “corrected” her, but not with love.

I assumed she should have known all these things. Foolish me forgot that I should have also known those things she pointed out about me too. Should I say we were too young to fully comprehend the concept of love?

We eventually broke up, and believe me, it felt like a part of me died. I really loved her. A day didn’t pass without me thinking about her and paying a little homage with my salty tears.

About one year and few months later, I met another woman. I had healed from my ex.

This new woman didn’t ask for much. But I didn't give her enough. Not money. Not big gestures. The small things. A phone call when she asked for one.

A picture sent without her having to ask first. The quiet, daily proof that she was chosen, not just loved from a comfortable distance.

I told myself texting was enough. I told myself she already knew how I felt. I was wrong, and I didn't understand how wrong until it was already too late to fix it with her.

You know one thing I have learnt about love? You don’t love someone in your own way. You love them the way they want to be loved.

You might be thinking that flowers and luxurious dinners are signals for love, but all she wants is just a late night talk, little stroll down the road while you hold her hands, that small gift you think is insignificant etc.

I carry that lesson into whatever this becomes with you. I know now that love isn't only the big declarations. It's the small, boring, repeated proof; the call you didn't have to make, the “thank you” you didn't have to say out loud, the effort nobody's clapping for.

I used to think grand gestures were the real test of love. I don't think that anymore. I think the real test is whether you show up on the ordinary Tuesday nobody's watching.

I will not be a perfect husband. I want to say that clearly, before you have any illusions about it. I will forget things sometimes. But I will definitely be the right husband, friend, father and partner.

I “might” get defensive when I should apologize first. I “might” retreat into work when I should be sitting with you instead, because building things has always been easier for me than sitting still with hard feelings.

I am telling you this, so that when it happens, and it will, or might, you'll know it isn't new information. It's simply the parts of me I'm still working on, or might have worked on it completely, the same way I hope you'll let me see the parts you're still working on too or have worked on.

I strongly believe love is a decision. I don't think that makes it less romantic. I think it makes it more honest.

Feelings come and go. I've learned that the hard way, watching my own certainty rise and fall over the years, sometimes for no clear reason at all.

If love only survived on feeling, no marriage would make it past the first difficult season.

I want to choose you on the days it feels easy, and I want to choose you, just as deliberately, on the days it doesn't. I want to choose you the day you look the most beautiful, and the day you look homeless. I mean it.

I think that's what the word actually means, underneath all the poetry people usually wrap around it.

I hope to lead with integrity. Not the performed kind or the kind people display for an audience.

The quiet kind; the version of me that behaves the same way whether or not anyone's watching, whether or not it costs me something, whether or not it's convenient that day.

I've fallen short of that plenty of times already. I expect I will again. But it's the direction I keep walking back towards, every time I drift from it, and I hope you'll recognize that pattern in me, even on the days the drifting is more obvious than the returning.

I hope to lead with kindness too, though I think kindness gets confused, often, with softness. I don't mean I want to be endlessly agreeable.

I mean, I want to be the kind of man who tells you the truth even when it's uncomfortable, because I respect you too much to protect you from it.

I want our home [ in West Virginia; I love nature ] to be a place where honesty doesn't require bracing for impact first.

I want you to know that difficult seasons don't scare me the way they used to. I've survived two losses I genuinely didn't think I'd survive. Not two actually, it’s exactly five, but I will tell you about the other three when we’re having dinner, while the slow soft music plays underneath.

I've built a business out of nothing more than persistence and a willingness to be wrong in public while I learned. I believe, somewhere underneath all the noise of daily life, that hard seasons are temporary, even the ones that don't feel temporary while you're standing inside them.

I want to be the kind of husband who reminds you of that on the nights you've forgotten it yourself, the same way I hope you'll remind me, on the nights I've forgotten it too.

There will be nights I forget it. I want to be honest about that, one more time, before I close this.

I don't know what season of your own life you're walking through right now, wherever you are, whoever you're becoming while I write this to a woman I haven't met yet.

I hope it's a good one. I hope, if it isn't, you're surrounded by people who show up for you, the way I intend to do so, once I finally find you, or once you find me.

I don't know exactly how we'll meet. I've stopped trying to predict it. I used to think love would come with some kind of unmistakable sign, the way it does in the stories people tell each other at weddings or in movies.

I think now it's usually quieter than that; a small, ordinary moment neither person recognizes as significant until much later, looking back, wondering how they almost missed it entirely.

Whenever it happens, I want you to know what you're walking into, as honestly as I can put it into words.

You're walking into a man who has grieved deeply and kept building anyway. A man who doubts, some days, more than he lets on, and is trying to get better at admitting that instead of hiding it.

A man who has failed at love once already, and has spent real time since then, learning exactly where he failed, so he doesn't repeat it with you.

A man who wants to build something that outlives him, and hopes, more than almost anything else, that you'll be standing right beside him while he does it.

I don’t even know your name, but I already know I want to spend the rest of my life learning it properly, not just the four, five or seven letters of it, but everything underneath them.

Your fears. Your mornings. The specific way you'll need to be loved on your hardest days, which I already know won't look exactly like the way I need to be loved on mine.

Wherever you are, I hope you're safe. I hope you're becoming exactly who you're meant to be, at whatever pace that takes.

And I hope, when we finally meet, you'll be able to look back at the man standing in front of you and recognize every single word of this letter as something I actually lived, not just something I once hoped I might become.

Until then, I'll keep building. I'll keep working on the parts of myself still worth improving. I'll keep choosing, on the good days and the harder ones, to believe that this; you, us, whatever we end up building together, is worth becoming a better man for, long before I ever get the chance to prove it to your face.

I'll see you when I see you. I hope I'm ready. I'm working every day to make sure I will be. With everything I have to give.

A man still becoming the one you deserve.

—TOBE, your husband, friend, father and partner.

I met her in the reading room on the third floor of UNILAG’s main library, during a Thursday afternoon, so hot the ceiling fans felt like they were just moving warm air around, out of politeness, rather than actually cooling anything.

I was “fighting” with a statistics textbook that had personally wronged me. She was two seats down, highlighting something in English literature with the kind of focus I didn't know twenty-year-olds still had.

She caught me staring at her highlighter collection. This girl had six different colors, organized by some system I never fully understood, and instead of looking away, she just said, quietly, so the whole reading room wouldn't hear:

"You've been stuck on the same page for twenty minutes. Statistics isn't supposed to hurt this much."

"It's personal between me and this textbook," I whispered back. "We have unresolved issues."

She laughed, but not loud, because you didn't laugh loud in that reading room without three different people shushing you at once with their eyes dilated.

The laugh was real, the kind that reached her eyes even while she pressed her hand over her mouth to keep it contained.

Her name was Sandra. By the time the library closed that evening, we'd moved from statistics jokes to arguing about whether Fela Kuti or Bob Marley made better protest music, an argument neither of us actually cared about winning, just an excuse to keep talking.

And me? I don’t think twelve people can beat me in any argument. Well, for two years, Sandra was the center of gravity around which my entire university life quietly rearranged itself.

We had our spot; third floor, same two seats, unofficially reserved by nothing but habit and mutual understanding.

We even had our Sunday ritual; Suya from the Mallam outside her hostel gate, eaten on the low wall by the faculty of arts, arguing about nothing important until the soft 7:00 PM darkness completely buries itself, but the street lights mounted by the pavements on campus always seem to resurrect the darkness.

We had inside jokes so specific that neither of us could explain them properly to anyone else without the explanation taking longer than the joke itself.

She wanted to write. Not just pass her literature courses. Like, actually write, stories that mattered, the kind she'd whisper the beginnings of to me during long walks back from lectures, testing lines out loud before she trusted them enough to put on paper.

I wanted to build things. I wasn’t particularly in computer engineering, but I loved software [ https://tobeio.vercel.app ] You know… half in love with data structures and algorithms, half convinced I was going to re-design the human genome to become something that’d outlast both me and Sandra, someday; I was studying Cell Biology & Genetics.

We used to lie on the grass near CITS some evenings. I’d listen to her reciting half-finished paragraphs, while I smile foolishly as if my understanding of literature and grammar could make Shakespeare irrelevant.

She came from a very good family. The type where her parents shuffled between church, school and home. But somehow, due to this style of upbringing, I could almost sense that her hormones were running riots.

One evening, I made up my mind that I was going to ask her out. Since she loved literature, I spent hours searching for the most poetic literature words that would impress her. My heart was willing, but my brain laughed.

The ones I found? I didn’t even understand them. I couldn’t pronounce them either. You know the way you’d find a word, and quickly searches for another simpler word that would replace it, simply because your brain is frowning? Exactly!

Believe me, I spent all night toiling. I didn’t even know that love has the power to make me feel like Letitia Elizabeth Landon ( she’s a poet )

When we met, she noticed how uncomfortable I felt, and immediately asked “Are you okay, TOBE?”

I couldn’t just wrap my head around it. I didn’t want to hear anything else, but “yes” when I asked her out. I stammered and said “Y-y-eah, I’m good…” I wasn’t good at all. I had watched TikTok videos where a guy asked a girl out and she replied with “ewww.”

We sat as usual and were talking. This time, a friend who was owing me some penny paid up. So, I had little cash to buy us things. Money wasn’t a problem for Sandra, but there’s just this innate feeling to provide for your woman, as a man.

Our conversation was different this time. We talked about our childhood experiences, toys, songs and even common games we played as children. From the conversation, I could tell she had a wonderful childhood memories.

As for me, it was crazy. The best memories were when rain fell and I’d be running around with tyres and pants shifted towards the left side of my black buttocks. I’d “drive” the tyre with Emeka, Chinedu, Stanley and Jide. We felt like we owned BMWs.

She was laughing while listening to my experiences as a child. Believe me, I have never seen this type of effortless happiness before. I stopped talking and was just smiling at her. She was still laughing.

Then I asked her, “Will you be my girlfriend?” The laughter reduced and the look on her face became serious, but not too serious; more like surprised. She said “Huh?”

I asked again, “Will you be my girlfriend?” This time, I was smiling slightly. You know… this gentle confidence that she’d say “yes.” But she moved back, almost maintaining a social distance. I thought I said something wrong, and I quietly recited “will you be my girlfriend?” In my head like “will-you-be-my-girlfriend?”, just to be sure I said the right thing.

She stood up, and I thought she wanted to leave. I stood up too. But she moved closer, gave me a hug, a warm hug, looked straight into my brown eyes and said “I hope I’d also carry your babies. Yes I’d be your girlfriend”

At that moment, if she asked for my kidney, liver, heart and soul, I’d give it without thinking twice. I felt like I had won in life. Really… I was happy.

l oved her the specific way you only love someone once, just early, before life has taught you to protect yourself properly; completely, loudly, without any of the careful boundaries adults eventually learn to build.

Sandra was brown in complexion, not chocolate, because chocolate was how she tasted when I finally…

Well, she had long legs, carefully carved hips, cradling thick thighs that jiggled just enough when she walked.

Soft hands that left heat everywhere they touched. Once she stroked you, you didn’t want to wash that skin for days. You wanted the ghost of her still on you.

Finally, I got a better apartment and moved out of Jaja Hostel. I waved bedbugs a goodbye. But I definitely missed my guys, especially James, who would warm and re-warm Egusi soup until it looked like Butter.

Final year arrived the way final years do; suddenly, and then all at once, swallowing every spare hour we used to give each other freely.

Her final year project consumed her nights. My full-time job with a fintech company consumed mine. We started missing our Sunday Suya, first occasionally, then consistently, both of us telling ourselves it was temporary, that once graduation came, we'd have all the time in the world to make up for the time we were currently losing.

I didn't notice, at first, how much distance had actually built up between us, because distance built slowly enough to feel like nothing, day by day, the way a crack in a foundation feels like nothing until the day it isn't.

We started texting more than talking. We started finishing conversations instead of really having them.

I told myself this was just a season, the hard final stretch before the reward on the other side, and I genuinely believed it. Right up until the night she finally said the thing I'd been too busy to notice she'd been building up the courage to say.

We were sitting on the same faculty lawn, months after our last real Sunday together, and she said, quietly, without any dramatics attached to it.

"TOBE, I’m really sorry. I don't think I know you the way I used to. And I don't think you know me either. I think we've both just been too scared and too busy to say that out loud."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that we were fine, that final year was just a hard patch we'd survive the same way we'd survived everything else.

She continued, “I cheated last week. He gave me all the attention I needed, helped with my final year project and stuff. I went to his place to just visit and I…”

She broke down in tears. She used to tell me literally everything about her day. How she cooked before anybody else woke up, how some girls in her hostel argued about different guys etc.

But some honest part of me, underneath the panic, already knew something was wrong somewhere. We'd stopped actually showing up for each other months earlier. I was too busy to even notice that she was barely telling me about her day…

The fintech space is not one where your code mistakes are measured in bugs or resolved over a quick meeting. One mistake and you’re in jail. I was engrossed with work.

We'd just kept calling it love out of habit, because neither of us wanted to be the one who said it out loud first. I guess I didn’t make her a priority, and she didn’t bother complaining because there’s a new guy who’s giving her attention.

I won’t deny the fact that there was a girl at the company I worked for. Aduke would make delicious food and bring some for me. Kind gestures here and there, random gifts and gists, harmless late night conversations, compliments about my lips and chest etc. Aduke liked me; it was obvious. I…I…I liked her too, but not like that. I mean, I had a girlfriend… but Aduke’s ass? Oh Lord!

Sandra and I didn't have one dramatic final fight. I think that's the part that still sits heaviest in my chest, even now.

Instead, it ended quietly, on that same lawn, under the same sky we'd spent two years memorizing together, with both of us crying without either of us actually raising our voices.

"I still love you," she said, and I believed her completely, because I could hear it wasn't a lie people say to soften an ending. Even though she fucked that bastard.

"I just don't think loving you is enough anymore, if neither of us is actually choosing to show up for it. I don't want us to become two people who resent each other for staying out of habit, even though I cheated.”

I didn't have a good argument against that. I've thought about it in the years since, turning it over from every possible angle.

She was right, and being right didn't make it hurt any less to watch her stand up from that lawn, hug me one last time, long enough that I felt her shaking, and walk back toward her hostel alone, in the dark, while I sat there until the security eventually asked me to leave the faculty grounds for the night.

I don’t block people, so I didn’t block her. I texted Aduke and told her what had happened. And somehow, I could literally sense it that Aduke was happy that we broke up, but she was also sympathetic about what had happened.

The next day, I heard a knock on my door. It was the compound’s care-taker who came to collect the regular NGN1,500.00 for sanitation. I literally thought it was Aduke.

I think about Sandra every time. I don't know if she ever finished the novel she used to whisper the beginnings of, on our walks home. I hope she did. I hope it's good.

I hope somewhere, some reader is falling in love with her sentences the exact way I once fell in love with the sound of her testing them out loud, uncertain, in the dark, walking beside me before either of us knew how temporary that walk actually was.

I don't regret loving her the way I did; completely, loudly, without the careful boundaries I've since learned to build around everyone who's come after her.

I think that kind of love only really happens once, early, before life teaches you to protect yourself from it. I got to have it. I just didn't get to keep it.

Some loves are not meant to last forever. I used to think that made them failures. I don't think that anymore. I think some loves are simply meant to teach you, fully and completely, exactly what you're capable of feeling, what to prioritize and how to make out time for people you love.

As you read this, Aduke is currently being curled up in my arm, fully naked, at past 4:00 AM, as I publish this article. Don’t blame me though…

Today, 1st of August, 2026, makes it exactly 2 years and 10 days since I started digging deep into the truths and claims in Islam.

I started this journey the way most honest searches begin, with a question I could not ignore.

Today, I want to walk you through exactly what I found, in the order I found it, with the proof, so you can go and check every single one of these things yourself.

A Muslim friend clearly told me “it’s not by force to believe in Islam as a religion. Even the Qur’an says it, so please don’t disturb me.” And she wasn’t lying.

What she said could be found in chapter 2, verse 256 of the Qur'an: "There is no compulsion in religion." I sat with that line for a long time. It felt like real spiritual freedom, the kind any honest person would want to build their faith on.

Then, a few weeks into my search, I found chapter 9, verse 5. The verse scholars themselves call "the sword verse." It tells believers to fight and kill those who worship other gods, wherever they are found, once certain sacred months have passed.

Here is the question that stopped me cold. How do you hold both of these verses, sincerely, in the same hand? I went looking for an answer, and I actually found one.

There is a real, respected area of Islamic religious law called "naskh," meaning cancellation. Old scholars wrote entire books listing which verses cancel which other verses. I swear to you, I am not making this up. It is taught inside Islamic religious law itself.

But here is the question I could not get past, and still cannot. If the Qur'an is supposed to be Allah’s perfect, unchanging word, why would parts of that word need a whole field of study just to explain which parts no longer count?

Ask yourself honestly. Does a perfect, timeless message usually need a manual just to figure out which of its own sentences to ignore, if it’s truly perfect?

Months into this search, I found something I did not expect at all. Islam teaches that the Torah and the Gospel were originally real messages from God, but were later changed by human hands over time. This idea has a name. It is called "tahrif." Forgive me if I spelt it wrongly.

But the Qur'an itself says, plainly, in chapter 6, verse 34: "There is none that can alter the words of Allah."

Sit with that for a moment, the way I had to. If nobody can change Allah's words, how were the Torah and the Gospel changed, if they were also, originally, Allah's own words?

Either Allah's words can be changed by human hands, which would mean this same risk applies to any book, even the Qur'an, one day. Or Allah's words truly cannot be changed at all, which would mean the Torah and Gospel we still have today should still be just as trustworthy as the day they were first written.

Both of these cannot be fully true at the same time. I have never found an answer that fully closes this gap. I have only found answers that manage it carefully.

About a year in, I found myself circling one of the oldest arguments in the entire Muslim world. It's an argument that split serious scholars from each other within just a few decades of Muhammad's death.

The Qur'an has verses that sound like real, personal free choice. Chapter 18, verse 29 says: "Whoever wills, let him believe. And whoever wills, let him disbelieve."

But the Qur'an also has verses that sound like Allah already decided, long ago, exactly who would believe and who would not.

Chapter 7, verse 178 says: "Whomever Allah guides, he is the rightly guided, and whomever He sends astray, they are the losers." Chapter 74, verse 31 says almost the same thing; Allah sending astray whoever He wants, and guiding whoever He wants.

This was not just me noticing something. Early Muslim scholars, including three of my close Muslim friends, noticed it too, so strongly that it split into two named groups called Qadariyya & Jabriyya.

The Qadariyya argued hard for real human free will. The Jabriyya argued just as hard that everything, including belief itself, was already fixed by God long before anyone was born.

Ask yourself this: Why would a perfect text cause controversies in Islam's own belief system, among earliest scholars, for centuries, instead of one, agreed-upon answer?

The most recent thing I found, closest to today, is the one I have not been able to put down since I first read it. Read this part slowly. That's not a suggestion. That's an instruction.

The very first hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari ( I’m sorry if I spelt tbis wrongly), the most trusted hadith collection in all of Sunni Islam, describes exactly how the Qur'an's message first began.

Muhammad was alone in the cave of Hira when, according to this account, an angel appeared and commanded him: "Iqra", which means "Read."

Muhammad answered honestly: "I cannot read." What happens next is written plainly, with nothing softened.

The angel grabbed him and pressed him so hard he felt he could not bear it, let him go, then commanded him again. This happened three separate times. Each time the pressure came back, until Muhammad, in his own words, felt he might actually die from the force being used on him. Only after the third time did the angel finally speak the words that became the first lines of the Qur'an.

Sit with that for a second. This wasn't gentle persuasion. It wasn't a soft whisper to a willing heart. This was physical force, repeated three times, on a man who had not even agreed to anything yet.

Now place that next to this:

The Bible ( I’m using the Bible because Qur’an 10:94 says “so, if you are in doubt about what We have revealed to you, then ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you…” )

Now, in Galatians chapter 1, verse 8, says: "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you, than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed."

Paul's instruction here is direct. Not "obey any angel who forces themselves on you." The opposite. Test even an angel's message against what has already been revealed, and reject it if it goes against the truth, no matter how strong or overwhelming that messenger seems.

Ask yourself the question sitting underneath both of these stories. If a message truly comes from the one true Allah, does it actually need to be physically forced into a man's chest until he can barely breathe?

Or does real truth, spoken by a real messenger of Allah, usually arrive in a way that doesn't require force to be believed?

There is a second layer to this same hadith that most people never get told. After this event, Muhammad went home shaking, and asked his wife Khadijah to cover him.

According to the same account, he was afraid he had encountered something evil, not something holy.

Khadijah, trying to comfort him, took him to her older cousin, Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a man who had already become a Christian and knew the earlier scriptures well.

It was Waraqah, not Muhammad's own steady confidence, who first told him this experience matched what had happened to earlier prophets, and that he had probably been chosen as a prophet too.

Read that again. The very first reaction to this event, from the man who supposedly received it directly, was fear that it was evil, not confidence that it was from Allah.

The comfort that it wasn't evil came later, secondhand, from a family member, already trained in a different religion's holy books.

Ask yourself honestly. Is that really how you'd expect the start of Allah’s final, perfect message to a chosen prophet to actually happen? Be honest with yourself.

I owe you the honest version of what happened next. I took every one of these problems to the strongest, most serious scholars I could get across to, and their best defenses. I wanted to believe their answers. But here is why, one by one, I could not fully accept them.

Let’s go back to the peace and the sword verses. The usual answer says this is simply about changing situations; peace while the group was small and persecuted, force once real war broke out. Fine. No wahala.

But then answer this directly. Why does chapter 9, verse 5 read like a general, open-ended command?

"kill the polytheists wherever you find them”, instead of language limited to one battlefield, one specific enemy, one clear moment in time?

Why did later scholars, building Islamic law for centuries afterward, treat this verse as cancelling dozens of earlier peaceful verses as a lasting legal rule, instead of treating it as a short-term wartime rule that expired once that one specific conflict ended?

If this were really just "different rules for a different moment," why did the harsher verse become the long-term legal default, while the peaceful verses became the ones scholars had to explain away as cancelled?

Let’s be honest, If you were building a moral system meant to last forever, would the exception take over the whole rule, or would the main rule stay strong and the exception stay small and limited?

Let’s also look at “the corrupted scriptures.” The usual answer draws a clean line between Allah's unchangeable original message, and flawed human copies that drifted over time. That sounds neat, until you place it next to something inconvenient.

The Qur'an itself, in chapter 5, verses 47 and 68, tells Jews and Christians to judge matters using their own Torah and Gospel, as if those books, at the very time Muhammad was speaking, were still trustworthy enough to be judged by.

If the Torah and Gospel were already so corrupted that they no longer matched Allah's true message, why does the Qur'an tell people to use them as a working standard, instead of warning that they were already too broken to trust?

There is a second problem too, one this answer never fully escapes. It cannot be tested or proven wrong. Any verse in today's Torah or Gospel that disagrees with the Qur'an gets called "corrupted," with no actual old manuscript needed to prove that claim, while any part that happens to match gets treated as still preserved.

Again, is that a real historical claim you could actually check and possibly prove false? Or is it a belief built specifically so that no evidence could ever be allowed to challenge it?

How about the one on free will and being sent astray? Let me paint a real life scenario for you. A father who predicts his son’s choice, does not reach into his son's heart and seal it shut, right?

But the Qur'an describes something stronger than simple prediction. Chapter 2, verses 6 and 7, says Allah has "set a seal" on the hearts of those who disbelieve, so that they are not able to believe.

Chapter 16, verse 108 repeats the same picture; hearts, ears, and eyes sealed shut by Allah himself. That is not just foreknowledge. That is described, in the text's own words, as direct, active causing.

So ask the harder question this comparison is quietly avoiding. If Allah himself seals a heart shut so it becomes unable to believe, and then punishes that same heart for failing to believe, is that a real test with a real, open outcome? Or is it a verdict already written before the trial even starts, dressed up afterward to look like fairness?

Of course, I won’s forget the the cave of Hira and the story of Daniel.

This is the one that fell apart the fastest once I actually checked it myself, instead of trusting the comparison secondhand. Go back and read Daniel chapter 10 for yourself.

The angel does not attack Daniel. It touches him gently, speaks to him right away, and says, twice, "do not be afraid," before delivering its message calmly and clearly, naming itself the whole time. There is no repeated physical crushing.

There is no moment afterward where Daniel wonders if he met something evil. There is no cousin who called in later, to confirm the experience was not demonic.

Now compare that, honestly, side by side, with a man physically pressed three separate times until he feared for his own life, who ran home shaking, asked to be covered, and openly feared he had met something evil, but comforted by a family member who had every emotional reason to soothe a terrified person, instead of the angel itself offering that same instant comfort Daniel received.

Does this comparison actually make the Hira story look stronger next to Daniel's? Or does putting them side by side show exactly how different a forceful, frightening, secondhand-confirmed experience really is, from a calm one that comforts and explains itself immediately?

And one more question worth sitting with. How much weight should we really give to a confirmation that came from Khadijah's own cousin, someone with an obvious personal reason to comfort a shaking family member, instead of from any independent person with nothing at all to gain either way?

I am not going to pretend that one search, however long, fully settles a question this big, with no doubt left at all.

What I can tell you honestly is this. Every standard answer I was given had a real, thoughtful shape to it at first. But every single one of them, once I pushed on it directly instead of accepting it politely, left a gap it could not quite close.

That does not prove Islam false beyond every argument. But it does mean the weight sitting on these answers is heavier than the confident tone they're usually delivered with would suggest.

And I think anyone searching honestly deserves to know that, before they simply accept the comfortable version of any of these explanations.

So I ask again, “Is Islam really true?”

I want to tell you about a name almost every Igbo child grows up fearing.

“Ekwensu”

Say it in most Igbo homes today, and people flinch a little, the same way you'd flinch hearing the word "Satan."

You see… that fear is not where the name started. It was built there, on purpose, by people who arrived from outside Igbo land with their own idea of evil, and needed a local name to attach it to.

Let me show you what Ekwensu actually was, before that happened.

Before Christianity arrived, Ekwensu was one god among many in the Igbo spiritual world, standing alongside other well-known deities like Ani, Amadioha, and Ikenga.

Few months back, I read a research material by P.J. Ezeh, in his book on “Ekwensu semantics and Igbo Christian theology”.

The original Igbo word “Ekwensu”, never carried the meaning of evil at all. He was simply one of the many gods worshipped across Igbo land, each with their own role and personality, the same way traditions all over the world describe multiple gods handling different parts of life.

Ekwensu had two main jobs. He was known as the god of bargaining and trade, and traders specifically called on him for his craftiness and cunning when negotiating deals.

If you were about to enter a difficult, high-stakes negotiation in the marketplace, Ekwensu was the spirit you invoked for sharp thinking and the upper hand.

His symbol was the tortoise, Mbe, an animal already famous in Igbo folklore for outsmarting bigger, stronger animals through cleverness rather than force.

He was also the god of war, called upon by warriors heading into battle, associated with the chaos and violence that war naturally brings.

This is where his more frightening, dangerous side came from, not because he was evil, but because war itself is violent, and Ekwensu represented that specific, necessary kind of force.

A trickster god of chaos and change, exactly like trickster figures found in many other cultures around the world, doing exactly what trickster gods are supposed to do: stir things up, test boundaries, reward cleverness over brute strength.

Nowhere in the original tradition was Ekwensu described as the source of all evil, or as a being standing in direct opposition to a supreme god, the way Satan is described as opposed to God in Christian theology. The traditional Igbo worldview never contained that specific idea at all.

This isn’t just an opinion. There’s a real, physical, cultural proof still standing today. I have seen it with my own two darkish-brown & smoky eyes.

Shrines dedicated specifically to Ekwensu still exist across Igbo land, with ritual and cultural activities tied to them. There's even a real, physical hill in Ukpor, in Nnewi South local government area, still known today as Ugwu Ekwensu; Ekwensu's Hill.

Communities have held, and in some places still hold, cultural festivals celebrating Ekwensu, with genuine pomp and celebration, not fear and avoidance. Natural landmarks were named after him.

None of that happens to a figure a community actually experiences as pure evil. You don't build a shrine, throw a festival, or name a beloved hill after the thing you believe represents total wickedness. You do that for a god you respect, even while treating him carefully.

Nigerian scholar, John Opata, my late father’s acquaintance, explored this directly in his own research, specifically examining whether Ekwensu was a heroic deity or had simply been recast as the Christian devil, and his work adds academic weight to what the shrines and festivals already show plainly.

So how did a respected trickster god of trade and war become the Igbo word people now use for Satan himself?

When Christianity arrived in Igbo land, missionaries needed to translate Christian concepts into the Igbo language so the message could actually be understood and accepted.

The problem they faced was that traditional Igbo cosmology simply didn't contain a figure matching the Christian devil, a singular, ultimate embodiment of evil standing in direct, eternal opposition to God.

Traditional Igbo religion instead, recognized many gods and spirits, each with their own mixed nature, capable of both help and harm depending on the situation, the same way human beings themselves are capable of both.

Missionaries picked Ekwensu, a deity already associated with chaos, violence, and cunning through his war and trickster roles, and began translating him as the equivalent of Satan.

You’d argue that your Bible says “the devil cometh not for, but to steal, kill and destroy…”, but killings, theft and destruction had been happening thousands of years before that Bible was compiled and published, with many parts removed; the Bible had over 66 books.

Over time, Ekwensu’s more respected qualities, the trade guidance, the cleverness, the celebrations in his honor, were pushed aside, while his more chaotic, violent associations were amplified and reframed as pure evil.

European missionaries used their own framework of good and evil to convince the Igbos that Ekwensu was Satan-like, a shift that conveniently served the larger colonial project of making local spiritual practices seem frightening and backward, something to be abandoned in favor of the new religion being introduced.

Ekwensu's identity was demonized and distorted, taking a deity who was actually a heroic figure of war and a patron spirit of warriors, and mistranslating him into the equivalent of the Christian devil.

It's not just that Ekwensu got mistranslated. It's that the entire concept of a cosmic, ultimate source of evil doesn't match how traditional Igbo thought explained evil at all.

In traditional Igbo religious thought, evil in the world is understood as coming from human choices and human actions, not from a specific evil spirit whose entire mission is working against God.

That's a fundamentally different way of explaining why bad things happen in the world. Christianity often locates ultimate evil in an external, opposing spiritual being.

Traditional Igbo thought located it in human behavior and human failure; meaning that the responsibility for cruelty, greed, and violence sat with people, not with a devil tempting them from outside.

That's not a small translation error. That's a completely different explanation for where evil comes from, quietly replaced with a foreign one, wrapped inside a familiar local name, so it would feel less like a replacement and more like a natural fit.

I'm not telling you this to convince you to abandon your current faith, whatever it is. I'm telling you this because I think you deserve to know when a piece of your own culture was quietly rewritten by outsiders, and given back to you wearing a mask that made it look like it had always been that way.

Ekwensu was a trickster. A god of sharp deals and dangerous battles, respected and occasionally feared the way you respect and fear a powerful, unpredictable force, not hated, not treated as the essence of evil itself.

Somewhere between the shrines your ancestors built for him and the fear you might feel hearing his name today, an entire religious tradition got quietly overwritten, and most people carrying that fear today have no idea it didn't originally belong to them at all.

SHARE THIS & EDUCATE SOMEONE.

I'm not going to give you the argument about who created God, or whether the universe needs a first cause. I'm not going to point at an earthquake or a war and say "see, this proves it."

Bad things happened long before any of these religions existed, and they'll keep happening regardless of what anyone believes. That's not evidence of anything except that the world is dangerous, which nobody was arguing against anyway.

I want to give you the arguments that actually came from inside the belief itself.

The ones you only really notice once you've been fully in it; praying in tongues, memorizing verses, defending the faith in arguments, and then started looking at it honestly, the way you'd look at anything else you'd built your whole identity around.

Here's the first thing that actually cracked something open in me, and it has nothing to do with disasters or cosmology.

I noticed that no matter what happened, there was always an explanation ready, and the explanation always fit perfectly, after the fact.

If a job interview went well, it was God opening a door. If it went badly, it was God closing a door to protect me from something worse, or testing my patience, or preparing me for something better later.

If a prayer got answered quickly, that was faith rewarded or mercy, right? If it took years, that was God's timing being perfect. If it never got answered at all, that was God saying no for reasons I wasn't meant to understand yet.

AREN’T THOSE THE EXPLANATIONS YOU’VE BEEN GIVEN ALL YOUR LIFE ?

Sit with that for a second. Every single possible outcome; yes, no, fast, slow, painful, easy, had an explanation already built in, ready to be applied after the fact, and every explanation always protected the same underlying belief.

That should bother you more than it usually does, because a belief system that can absorb literally any outcome without ever being at risk of being wrong isn't actually making a real claim about the world.

It's making a claim that's been carefully insulated from ever being tested. Think about what it would actually take to prove this kind of belief false, inside its own framework. Nothing. Perfectly engineered to never make you ask questions, right?

There is no outcome, none, that a sufficiently motivated believer couldn't fold back into "God's plan." That's not a small logical footnote. That's the whole structure quietly telling you it was never built to be checked against reality in the first place, only to be defended from it.

Here's the one that actually kept me up at night, long before I stopped believing entirely.

I was taught, plainly, that God is perfectly just. Not mostly just. Not just by human standards. Perfectly just, in a way that made human justice look like a rough sketch of the real thing.

And I was also taught that a person who lives, say, seventy years, making mistakes, some serious, most fairly ordinary, and dies without accepting a specific belief [ Jesus Christ ], faces conscious torment that never ends. Not even for seventy years.

Not for seven thousand. Forever, with no possibility of ever reaching a point where the punishment matches the crime.

Now, hold those two ideas next to each other honestly, using the exact language they were both handed to me in.

Perfect justice, by any definition anyone has ever used for the word "justice," involves punishment matching the offense.

A crime committed in a finite amount of time, by a finite, limited human being, with a finite capacity to even fully understand the consequences of their choice, is being met with an infinite consequence.

That's not proportional under any system of justice ever devised by a human court, philosophy, or legal code in history. It's the literal opposite; it's punishment stretched infinitely beyond the size of the offense.

So I had to ask myself, honestly: is this actually justice at all, using the very word the belief system itself insists on? Or is "justice" simply being redefined, quietly, to mean "whatever this system decides to do," rather than the concept of proportionality the word has always meant everywhere else it's used?

You can't call something perfectly just, while defining justice in a way that would be called monstrously unjust in literally every other context a human being ever encounters it.

Here's something most people outside the faith have never actually read closely, and most people inside the faith are trained not to look at directly.

In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 13, verse 30, Jesus is recorded saying, plainly, about the dramatic end-times events he had just finished describing:

"Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done." Matthew's Gospel repeats the same line almost word for word.

Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica describing the second coming in a way that includes himself among those expected to still be alive when it happens:

"we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord."

These aren't obscure verses buried in a footnote. They're direct, specific, time-bound predictions, made by people fully expecting to see the events unfold within their own generation. That generation has now been gone for roughly two thousand years.

Here's the part that should genuinely make you pause, whether you're a believer or not: watch what happens, historically, every single time a specific religious prediction fails to happen on schedule.

The prediction doesn't get abandoned. It gets reinterpreted. "This generation" quietly becomes "the generation that sees the final signs," stretching the definition until it can no longer fail.

Or "this generation" gets reread as referring to the Jewish people as an ethnic group persisting through history, rather than the specific crowd of people standing in front of Jesus at the time.

I watched this same pattern happen in real time, inside my own church [ well, back then when I used to go ], with modern end-times predictions; specific dates set, passed without incident, and quietly reinterpreted afterward rather than treated as a failed claim.

Once you've watched that exact pattern happen with your own eyes, in your own lifetime, it becomes very hard to un-see it happening in the ancient text too.

Here's one that rarely gets discussed plainly, and it strikes right at the theological heart of the religion, not some peripheral detail.

The claim that Jesus is the promised messiah rests heavily on his lineage tracing back to King David, which is exactly why both Matthew and Luke include a genealogy connecting Jesus to David.

The problem is that these two genealogies don't match. Matthew traces the line through Solomon, one of David's sons. Luke traces it through Nathan, a completely different son of David.

The names of the generations in between are almost entirely different from each other. Even the total number of generations listed between David and Jesus differs sharply between the two accounts.

This isn't a minor discrepancy about a date or a place name.

This is the foundational genealogical proof for the single most important theological claim in the entire New Testament, and the two primary sources for it, contradict each other at the level of basic facts, which son of David, and which names came after him.

If this genealogy is meant to be read as a literal historical record establishing a specific claim, it fails at the most basic possible test: internal consistency between its own two earliest sources.

Here's the last one, and it's the most personal, because I lived it directly.

I remember, vividly, the specific feeling of being "filled with the Spirit"; the warmth, the tears, the sense of not being alone, sometimes even speaking in tongues, utterly convinced in that moment that I was experiencing direct, unmistakable contact with God.

I want to be honest: that feeling was completely real. I'm not claiming I faked it or imagined it.

What I eventually had to confront was this: that exact same category of experience; the warmth, the tears, the overwhelming sense of presence, even the loss of ordinary language in favor of ecstatic speech, is reported, in strikingly similar terms, by devout practitioners inside completely different, mutually contradictory religious traditions.

Sufi mystics describe it. Practitioners of Hindu bhakti devotion describe it. Some secular meditators, with no religious framework at all, report the same category of overwhelming, tearful, presence-filled experience during deep meditative states.

If this specific subjective experience is genuine evidence of the Christian God's presence, why does the same experience, described in nearly identical terms, show up just as reliably inside religious systems that explicitly reject the Christian God's exclusive claims?

Either the feeling isn't actually unique evidence of one specific God, or an awful lot of sincere people in completely contradictory religions are somehow all receiving visits from the same being who supposedly demands exclusive devotion to only one of their traditions.

I owe the other side of this a fair hearing too, because I used to give these responses myself, and some of them are more serious than they first sound.

READ THIS CAREFULLY, BECAUSE I KNOW YOU’D ARGUE:

On the unfalsifiability problem, a thoughtful believer would argue that a personal God engaging with individual lives should be expected to respond in varied, unpredictable ways, the way a wise parent doesn't apply one rigid rule to every situation with their child, variability in outcome isn't automatically evidence of an empty concept.

On hell, some serious theological traditions inside Christianity itself; annihilationism and certain strands of universalism, reject eternal conscious torment specifically because of this proportionality problem, arguing the traditional view may be a later distortion rather than the original teaching.

On the failed timeline, many scholars point to a preterist reading, arguing "this generation" referred to the specific first-century audience witnessing the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, an event that did occur within that generation, rather than a still-future final return.

On the genealogies, the most common defense argues Matthew traces Joseph's legal lineage, while Luke traces Mary's biological lineage, which would explain two different paths back to David through two different family lines.

On religious experience, believers might argue that a God who created all people might reasonably make his presence felt across many traditions in some form, without that undermining the specific claims of any one of them entirely because He’s omnipresence abi?

I think some of these defenses are genuinely more serious than others.

The genealogy explanation, in particular, has real problems of its own that goes beyond what I can fully unpack here. But I'd rather hand you the strongest version of each response than pretend they don't exist, because the version of this argument that only works against a strawman was never the version worth having in the first place.

So, I ask again: DOES GOD EXIST, or HUMANS MADE UP CONCEPTS TO EXPLAIN CERTAIN THINGS?

Imagine this happening to you. Not to a character. Not to a stranger. To you.

It begins with silence. Not ordinary quiet; a wrong kind of quiet, the kind that arrives all at once instead of settling in slowly. One moment the night sounds normal. The next, everything outside your window simply stops. No generator hum. Just the weird insect sound. No wind.

Even your own breathing sounds too loud in your ears, like the silence is listening to it.

The air in the room changes too. Colder, suddenly, in a way that has nothing to do with weather. You'll feel it first on the back of your neck, then crawling slowly down your spine, the exact temperature of a hand that has no blood left inside it to warm.

Then the knock comes.

Kpor… kpo……kpor.

Three times. Slow. Unhurried. Each knock landing exactly the same distance apart as shown in the ellipses, like something counting, you know… like something that has practiced this exact rhythm for a very long time and refuses to rush it now, not when it's finally close enough to be heard.

Then came a voice no human throat should ever produce. It sounded like an ancient village elder speaking from the grave, fused with the terrifying bass of a bull. You know the way a bull does the “moo” sound? Exactly… imagine it speaking like that.

You will stand there frozen out of fear. You will think you’re hallucinating , but you’re not. A part of you goes very still. A part of you already wants to run.

You open the door anyway, because whether you like it or not, you will surely open the door or it will force itself in.

There is now a figure with broken teeth and fresh blood dripping down, half of its head displaying the skull, with its one eye standing in the dark, close enough that you should see it clearly, and yes, you can actually see it.

In its hands, it holds flowers. Not fresh ones. Flowers already curling brown and soft at the edges, the way things look after they've been left somewhere for far too long, the smell of them reaching you before anything else does; sweet and rotten at once, the smell of a florist's shop built directly on top of a grave.

Then it speaks, and the sound of it crawls straight up the back of your skull before your ears even fully register the words. Two voices, layered slightly apart from each other, like something learned to speak by copying a recording that was never quite in sync.

"You forgot me," it says ( with that deep bull-like voice ). "You forgot to say it while I could still hear you say it."

You slam the door out of fear. Your own hands are shaking too violently to lock it on the first two attempts, and in the gap between those failed attempts, you swear you can still hear that figure breathing on the other side.

Slow. Patient. Not desperate to even get in. Simply willing to wait, for as long as it takes, because it already knows exactly how this ends.

At this point, you’d be wondering who you forgot because that voice says “you forgot me.”

Don’t even lie to yourself, a name won’t surface at all, whether you want it to or not. You’re fucking scared to your bones already.

That's the true horror hiding underneath all of this, not the ugly figure that knocked your brown door, not the rotten flowers, not the doubled bull-like voice. The horror is that you don’t even know exactly who is standing at that door.

Maybe it's that person who quietly paid for something that changed your entire life and never once brought it up again, never made you feel small for needing it, and you kept telling yourself you'd properly thank them tomorrow, until tomorrow simply stopped being available to you.

Maybe it's the person who taught you everything you now survive on, who gave you years of patience you never earned and never repaid, whose name you let the world forget while you accepted praise for something they built inside you first.

Maybe it's someone who is, right now, tonight, still alive, still breathing the same air as you, and some quiet, cowardly part of you has already decided there's no urgency, because surely there will be another chance to say it properly, later, when it's more convenient, when you're less busy, when the timing finally feels right.

Maybe it’s that coursemate who contributed one way or the other to your life, even if both of you have fallen apart for some reason. But you never really got to say “thank you” or show any form of appreciation.

May it’s your parent or elder brother/sister, who usually show up for you, and you think it’s easy and normal for them to do so, so you never said thank you.

There is no later. There has never actually been a later. There has only ever been now, and the lie that now can wait.

Imagine that figure keeps coming every night. Like, it does not end after one visit. Imagine every night, that figure brings a new shape to your door, with placards, each with a name you forgot, each one repeating the same sentence in that same wrong, doubled voice, until the words themselves start to feel less like language, and more like something being carved slowly into the inside of your skull.

By the fourth night, you no longer sleep at all. You keep every light burning, all night, every night, and still the cold follows you room to room, pooling in corners, sitting just behind your shoulder no matter which direction you turn to face it.

You start hearing the knock even when no one is there. You start seeing the ugly figure’s face in mirrors you pass too quickly to look at directly.

You understand, by then, exactly what is happening to you, and understanding it does nothing at all to stop it.

On the seventh night, there is no knock. That absence is somehow worse than every knock that came before it, because silence, by then, has taught you exactly what it's capable of hiding.

You wake somewhere else entirely. Not your bed. Cold ground beneath you, wet with something you don't examine too closely, the smell of turned earth and old flowers thick enough to taste at the back of your throat.

You are standing in a graveyard that stretches farther than any real cemetery should, fog low across the ground, no moon, no stars, only a gray half-light that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

In front of you, sits a gravestone with your name already carved into it, deep and permanent, the letters worn slightly at the edges as though it has stood there far longer than you have been alive to see it. The second date beneath your name is smudged. Deliberately unfinished. Waiting.

And the grave is buried, completely, suffocatingly ( if there’s a word like this), beneath a mountain of flowers so vast you cannot see the earth beneath it at all.

Imagine more flowers still arriving, even now, carried by different figures with cracked skull, fresh dripping blood and painful shouts, moving slowly around the gravestone in complete silence, laying the flowers down one after another in a straight line.

None of them look at you at first. They only look down, arranging their flowers with the careful, endless patience of people who are in absolutely no hurry, because they have already understood something you have spent your entire life refusing to accept: that time was never actually on your side.

Then, slowly, one of them looks directly at you, and when it speaks, every figure in that entire graveyard speaks with it, one single voice split into a hundred whispering echoes:

"We will keep bringing these flowers. We have all the time you didn't."

I am not telling you this to entertain or scare you. I want that cold feeling sitting in your chest right now to stay there, at least long enough for it to actually change something, because here is the truth underneath every frightening image I just gave you:

Gratitude delayed is not gratitude saved. It is a debt, growing quietly larger in the dark, held by something far more patient than you will ever be, waiting only for the single guaranteed moment when it becomes too late to pay it to the person who actually earned it.

Somewhere tonight, there is a person still breathing, still able to hear your voice, still capable of feeling your words land somewhere warm inside their chest, who deserves to hear exactly what they mean to you.

Not whispered at their funeral. Not confessed to strangers once it costs you nothing to admit it.

THEY WANT TO HEAR IT NOW.

While they can still stand in front of you and receive it.

Say it today. Call them today. Do not wait for the occasion to make it feel appropriate, because whatever is keeping count in the dark does not care about occasions.

It only cares about time, and time was never yours to spend carelessly in the first place.

Give people their flowers now, while they can still smell them, still hold them, still look you in the eyes and understand, fully, exactly what they meant to you.

Start with yourself first. Then give others their flowers 💐.

My dad died on the 13th of October, 2021 at 3:17 PM in the afternoon. We were in Enugu State for treatments.

I remember the exact time because some moments burn themselves into your memory whether you want them to or not.

That number, “3:17”, still sits somewhere in the back of my mind, quiet, permanent, like a scar that stopped hurting on the surface but never healed underneath.

Before that day, my life looked very different. I was deeply devoted to my faith. Not in a casual way. In a real, serious way. I went to church often. I know church doesn’t make one a true Christian, but let me assume you understand what I mean…

I prayed with my whole heart, not just with my mouth. Most of my close friends at that time weren't just regular churchgoers, they were actual pastors.

Grown men, further along in ministry than I was in age, and somehow they were my closest circle. That's how deep my faith life went back then. It wasn't decoration. It was the center of how I lived.

So when my dad got sick, I did what felt natural to me. I reached out to those pastor friends. I told them, "My dad is sick. Please, let's pray together. Let's stand in faith for him."

We prayed. Genuinely. Not performing for anyone. I believed, fully, that God heard us.

Then he died, regardless.

I don't think I can fully explain what that did to me, but I'll try, in simple words. It felt like my whole world cracked open at once.

Not slowly. All at once, the way glass breaks when something hits it hard enough; no warning, just suddenly, everything that used to hold it together lying in pieces on the brown floor.

I had questions. So many questions. And they weren't quiet questions either. They were loud, angry, desperate questions, the kind that come from somewhere deep in your chest, not just your thick head.

After everything, the prayers, the fasting, the pastors, the faith, treatments, drugs etc.

This man still died.

So is God even real? Or is it that God simply doesn't answer prayers? Maybe He’s selective in answering prayers? Did any of it actually mean anything?

I stopped going to church in 2021. Not because I woke up one random day and decided to quit. It happened slowly, then all at once, the way most real changes in a person's life tend to happen.

I started asking questions I had never let myself ask before. I was trying to find the truth, the real truth, not the comfortable version I had been handed since I was 9.

Once I started asking questions, I couldn't stop. One question always led to another, bigger, deeper one underneath.

I asked myself: What actually makes someone a Christian? Is it just being born into a Christian family? Is it a checklist of beliefs? Is it a feeling? Nobody had ever really made me sit down and think about that before. I had just always been one, the way you inherit a family name.

Then I asked something deeper:

Is Christianity the one true religion, out of all the 5,000+ religions in the world? If God is truly an all-loving God, why did He create hell for those who don’t believe in Him, since we all have free wills? Why’s there many denominations among the Christian faith, with clearly contrasting doctrines and even belief systems, unlike Islam with just one unified belief system and zero denomination?

This particular question really sat heavy with me:

What about a child born in South Sudan, who grows up and automatically becomes Muslim, simply because of the family and country they were born into?

Don’t tell me it is his responsibility to seek the truth, when everything he had known all his life was the “truth.”

That child didn't choose their religion any more than I chose mine. If religion decides something as important as where a person spends eternity, then it felt strange to me that so much of it seemed to come down to geography, an accident of birth, not a real, chosen decision.

So I asked: Does geography decide someone's faith? And if it does, doesn't that feel unfair? Doesn't that feel like something bigger than any one person's fault or choice?

Then came the biggest question of all: Why do we have so many different religions, all confident, all sure of themselves, all claiming to hold the real truth? If the truth was simple and clear, why would there be so much disagreement about something so important?

Have you ever questioned what you believe in or you just believe them?

if you claim to be convinced, that boy born in South Sudan was also convinced. If you talk about encounters, different religions had one encounter or another.

I didn't have answers. I still don't have all of them, if I'm being fully honest with you.

For a while, I leaned hard into doubt. I even called myself an atheist at some point. Other times, agnostic; meaning I simply didn't know, and wasn't sure anyone could know for certain.

I read books and materials that argued against the existence of God, trying to build a case in my own head, trying to convince myself fully, one way or another, just so I could stop living in the uncomfortable middle.

I read books on satanism, hermeticism and even demonology. I stopped reading the Bible for a good period of time. In fact, I was engrossed in the concept of theistic satanism; I wanted to force myself to believe that Satan is worthy of being worshipped.

The truth is, the middle is a hard place to live. It's easier, in some ways, to be fully certain about something, fully believing, or fully not believing, than to sit in the space between, holding a question you can't fully answer, day after day.

But that middle space is where I've mostly lived since 2021. I'm still there now, if I'm being completely honest with you.

After my dad died, I didn't have much time to sit down and process anything properly. Life doesn't wait for you to heal before it hands you responsibility.

My dad was gone, and suddenly there were people who needed me to be steady, even while I wasn't steady at all inside.

My mum needed support. My siblings needed someone to help hold things together. So that's what I did. I stopped thinking so much about the big questions, the ones about God, and prayer, and fairness, because there simply wasn't room for them anymore.

I was too busy trying to survive, trying to be the responsible one, trying to make sure the people I loved didn't fall apart just because I was falling apart quietly on the inside.

Looking back now, I think that period of just surviving was its own kind of numbness. Not healing. Just distraction with a purpose attached to it. I didn't go to church much during that time.

The questions I had were still sitting there, unanswered, just pushed to the side because there wasn't space in my day for them.

Slowly, though, something in me started to soften. Not all at once. It came in small pieces; a moment of quiet gratitude here, a small prayer whispered without really planning to pray, a feeling every now and then that maybe I hadn't fully closed that door after all.

I wasn't back to where I used to be, back to those days of pastor friends and constant church attendance. But something in me was beginning to lean back toward faith again, carefully, the way you test weight on a leg that's still healing from an injury.

I want you to notice that word: beginning. Because that's exactly where I was. Not fully back. Just beginning. And that's exactly when it happened again.

You see…I met Williams, a core Christian, at DLI [ Distant Learning Institute ], in UNILAG, just after our FSC 111 lectures [ it was called Introductory Biology then ]. He noticed that I was looking for every possible way to charge my iPhone 6S, so he gave me his powerbank, which was on 25%.

We didn’t become friends because of powerbank. No. There was just something about him that gives this “I have your back” energy. So, he become my “brother.”

We’d talk about many things. He knew the girl I “liked” back then and he’d occasionally teased me about it.

Yeah, “liked.” I think the best phrase to use was “attatched to.” I wasn’t capable of anything romance at that time. Williams and I had crazy plans, ranging from academics to politics, to business to life decisions, including the type of women we were going to marry.

Have you noticed the pattern? God always made sure He surrounded me with quality Christians. First, pastors and secondly, a godly friend.

In fact, I co-founded a platform with him, called “THE FORUM”, where we’d discuss real life issues facing real people; abuse, violence, controversial topics, low self esteem etc.

He really had plans to make impact and change lives. It was part of our plan, during an important conversation on the 27th of January, 2025. We had an extensive discussion on WhatsApp.

I was the PRO at that time, and he was the Assistant General Secretary. He wanted to become the departmental president, so that we could have a bigger and more influential platform to achieve our goals.

All strategies were laid out. Risk assessments were examined. In almost five hours of serious conversation, we had strategized how the next session would look like.

We chatted till about 12:47 AM thereabout.

“Who has heard from Williams? He’s not on the virtual class yet.” One of my course mates asked on our general group chat.

We were having virtual classes back then in 300L first semester.

Williams was this friend that would call you the moment he noticed you’re not in class. He had complete notes, so I’d borrow some and read.

That morning [ now, 28th of January, 2025 ], I didn’t get a text or a call. I just assumed that his phone’s battery was flat. Or he ran out of data.

Almost immediately, I got a text from an unknown nunber:

“zAHEEr, Williams is dead. Please, take heart”

I hissed. What made it look like a prank was the “take heart.” It sounded like what a typical African parent would say.

So I went to eat. It was rice and beans with some scattered pieces of fish, and enough plantain. I was eating and another person texted:

“TOBE, we lost Williams this morning. They said he just shouted at night and was rushed to the hospital, but died this morning.”

The warm rice in my mouth felt like debris. I couldn’t swallow, and I couldn’t spit out. My lips were shaking and I felt dizzy immediately. I managed to pick up my iPhone X to call Williams.

The call went through, but I was hearing an elderly woman crying and wailing “Ahhh, Kehinde o… yeee, hmm hmmm, Williams ti ku.”

It wasn’t looking like a prank anymore. I don’t know if there’s a science for this, but I felt cold immediately, especially around my neck region. Migraine followed immediately. I was dizzy, but my eyes were blurry at the same time.

I cried like a baby. I was too angry to even cry when my Dad waved the earth a goodbye, but the grief came rushing back in.

I need to tell you about the night before, because it's the part of this that I think about the most, more than almost anything else in this whole story.

We talked about being successful together. About building things. About the future, like it was a place we were both definitely going to arrive at, side by side, the way we always had been since we became friends.

And then he died.

I don't have neat words for what that did to me. I'm not sure neat words exist for something like that. One night you're sitting with someone, dreaming out loud about a future you're both certain you'll get to see.

The next, that person is simply gone, and the future you were building together becomes a future you now have to imagine alone, if you can even bring yourself to imagine it at all.

When my dad died, I had questions. When my best friend died, right after I had slowly started to lean back toward some kind of faith, it felt like something inside me just gave up entirely.

It wasn't even proper thinking anymore, if I'm honest. It was just this loud, aching confusion sitting in my chest.

What kind of God allows this to keep happening? Not just once. Twice. To the same person. Right when that person was quietly, carefully, trying to find his way back to believing again.

It felt, in that moment, less like a coincidence and more like a pattern. Like every time I tried to rebuild something with God, life would take something else from me, as if to remind me not to get too comfortable, not to trust too much, not to hope too openly.

Out of anger, I told God “Fuck you!”

I remember asking myself, bitterly: Is this some kind of test? And if it is, what exactly am I supposed to be learning from losing the two people who mattered most to me, right as I was starting to heal? I didn't have an answer then. I still don't have a full answer now.

I lost interest in many things, activities and even people. There was zero interest to attend the FYW [ Final Year Week ] events. Who was I going to make memories with? I sure have other people I talk to, but let me assume you get the point.

What's strange about grief, I've learned, is that it doesn't replace the last grief. It just adds itself on top, so you end up carrying more than one loss at the same time, even years apart.

When my best friend died, I wasn't just grieving him. I was grieving my dad all over again, in a fresh way, because the old wound simply reopened right alongside the new one.

I found myself back in that same, familiar space of doubt, the same questions from 2021, just louder this time, because now they had new evidence to back them up.

If losing my dad after all that prayer had been hard to make sense of, losing my best friend right as I was quietly trying to trust God again felt almost like proof.

Like the universe, or God, or whatever was actually out there, was making a point I didn't want to understand.

I won't lie and tell you I've fully worked through that feeling. Some days I still feel the weight of it, sitting right there in my chest, unresolved. Other days, I manage to hold it a little more gently, without needing to have it all figured out immediately.

I won't pretend this ends with a neat answer, because my life hasn't given me one yet. I'm still asking these questions.

Some days, I feel close to some kind of peace with it all. Other days, the old anger comes back, the same anger I felt the moment I heard my dad was gone…

…after everything we had prayed for, and the same anger that returned, sharper somehow, the moment I lost my best friend right as I was quietly trying to come back to faith.

What I've learned, slowly, is that asking these questions doesn't make me a bad person, or a failed Christian, or someone who loved God too little.

If anything, I think it means I loved something enough to be devastated when it didn't behave the way I was taught to expect. You don't ask this many hard questions about something you never cared about in the first place.

I still don't know exactly where I stand. Some days I lean back toward faith. Some days I lean away from it entirely. Most days, honestly, I just live somewhere in between, still turning the questions over in my hands like stones I haven't finished examining yet.

If you're reading this and you've ever lost someone you prayed hard for, and you've ever quietly wondered whether any of it meant anything at all, I want you to know you're not alone in that feeling.

I don't have a clean answer for you, because I don't have one for myself yet either. But I've learned that the questions themselves aren't the enemy. Maybe the real dishonesty would have been pretending I never had them at all.

But one thing I sure know is that, even in grave, God is still God. But at the same time, grief is powerful enough to create a distance between you and Him, not take you away from Him.

Something in me is fully aware that there’s definitely a higher being, much more sophisticated than my intellect, grief, anger or fear. Should I call it “God”, “Ogun”, “Amadioha”, or “Obatala?” I don’t know. I can’t prove it.

Her name was Folake. I wish I could keep this a secret, but it’s worth telling, and it’s best read at 10:00 PM.

We met the way rivals meet; across a room full of strangers, both trying to win the same thing.

It was a pitch night in Victoria Island, Lagos. You know… just a big stage, good lighting, investors sitting in a row like judges at a beauty pageant, sipping expensive red wine they didn't pay for.

Folake had built a shortlet mobile app [ web.staytrove.com ] for Lagos residents. So had I. Same idea, two different founders, one night, one small “pot” of N150M that could only go to one of us.

She watched me pitch from the back of the room. I was smooth. Too smooth. I made jokes at the right moments.

I made eye contact with every investor like I already knew their names, especially with a middle aged woman who looks like she would fuck me right away.

When I stepped down the stage, sweaty under the lights but calm on the outside, I found Folake’s eyes across the room and smiled like I already knew what she was thinking.

I walked straight to her.

"You're going to tell them my numbers are fake," I said, handing her a glass of wine she hadn't asked for.

"Your numbers are fake," she said, taking the glass anyway.

"Inflated," I corrected. "Not fake. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"There is, if you say it with a smile," I said, and smiled at her like I was proving my own point.

“Tch, such a seductive prostitute”, Folake said within her own heart.

I could almost hear her say those words, just from her facial expression alone.

She beat me that night. Her pitch was better. Her numbers were real. But instead of walking away angrily, I bought her a drink after, and we argued about business for two more hours, until the bar staff started stacking chairs around us because it was clear neither of us planned to leave.

That should have been the end. A funny story you tell once, then forget. Instead, I called her two days later, not about business, just to ask a few questions I could have easily used ChatGPT for.

She gave the correct answer, but I intentionally disagreed completely. I gave almost a valid reason for my answer, but I knew it was wrong.

I liked her voice, especially around 8:15 PM+

She never mentioned that she was engaged. She kept picking up, kept talking, giggling, laughing and saying that slow toned “ssttoopp TOBE.”

I also never mentioned that I was in a “committed” relationship for three years.

By the time this story really begins, Folake and I had been best friends for two years. Both of us were now engaged to other people.

Folake to a man named Rotimi, calm and steady, the kind of man who never raised his voice even when he had every reason to. Well… I was engaged to Stella, sharp and funny, the kind of woman who could read a room in seconds and never missed a lie.

Nobody who watched Folake and I together believed we were "just friends."

It wasn't that we touched too much, or said anything we shouldn't. It was smaller than that. It was the way my eyes found her the second she walked into any room.

It was the way she remembered exactly how I took my coffee, and I remembered exactly which perfume she wore on days she needed extra courage.

It was the way our conversations moved fast, like a private language built over two years, full of jokes nobody else understood and silences that never felt awkward, only comfortable.

To an outsider, it looked like something. Because, honestly, it was something. Neither of us ever pretended otherwise. That was the part that confused people the most.

We didn't deny the chemistry. We just never let it become anything more than what it already was.

One night, months before this story reaches its point, we sat on a rooftop bar in Ikoyi, the kind of place with soft lighting and a view of the city glittering below like scattered gold.

Rain was starting, light at first, tapping the roof above us like a warning that hadn't decided if it meant business yet.

I was watching her the way I always watched her when I thought she wasn't looking. She caught me anyways.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm thinking," I said, not bothering to deny it. "About how unfair it is that you got more beautiful with age. Some people have the decency to fade a little. You didn't give me that mercy."

"You're one to talk," she said, feeling the familiar warmth rise in her chest, the one she never fully admitted to anyone, not even herself.

"I've spent two years pretending your voice doesn't do something unfair to my focus every time you say my name like that."

"Like what?" I asked, intentionally leaning closer.

"Like you already know exactly what it does to me."

For a moment, neither of us said anything. The rain grew a little heavier. The city noise faded into the background, the way it does when your whole attention narrows down to one single person sitting across from you.

My eyes held hers a second longer than friendship usually allows. Her breath caught, just slightly, just enough for her to notice it herself.

It would have been so easy. One small movement. One less careful word.

Instead, she laughed; a soft, little shaky laughter, breaking the spell on purpose before it could finish forming.

"This is the part where we remember we're both getting married to other people."

"It is," I agreed, laughing too, though my voice came out rougher than usual.

"Rotimi would end me slowly. With a smile on his face the entire time."

"Stella would help him hold you down," Folake said. "And I would let her."

"Careful," I said, eyes still warm, still lingering. "That's starting to sound like jealousy."

"It's not jealousy," she said, steadying herself, steadying the moment. "It's just…honesty. I know excellence when I see it. I don't need to own it to admire it.”

That was always their rule, spoken or not: name the truth out loud, so it never had the power to hide.

Three months later, work “forced” us together in a way neither of us had planned for. A joint project.

Three days in Enugu, in a hotel with too few working elevators and one very small conference room that smelled permanently of instant coffee.

We worked late every night, laptops open, papers scattered everywhere, arguing about numbers the same way they'd argued over a call two years earlier; sharp, quick, comfortable.

On the second night, close to midnight, both of us exhausted, she fell asleep sitting up on the small hotel couch, laptop still glowing on her legs.

Folake was insanely beautiful, with thick chocolate thighs that could squeeze a watermelon with ease. She was 70% legs; yes, she was tall, thick (not fat), with long fingers and succulent-looking lips. Her eyes were bright, really really bright. Exactly, a model build. If her thighs were thick, you should have a clear picture of how her “behind” would look like.

I didn't wake her right away. I sat there a moment longer than I should have, watching her sleep, feeling something in my chest tighten in a way I'd spent years training myself not to examine too closely.

Then I gently took the laptop from her lap, set it aside, and covered her with the thin hotel blanket folded at the end of the couch.

She woke up an hour later to find me still there, sitting across the room in the dark, quietly working by the light of my iPhone 12, so I wouldn't disturb her.

"You didn't wake me," she said, voice thick with sleep.

"You looked like you needed it more than the deadline needed you," I said.

She sat up, blanket sliding off her shoulders, and looked at me for a long moment in the dim light. Something passed between us in that silence; heavy, honest and undeniable.

The kind of moment two people either walk toward or very deliberately walk away from.

“TOBE," she said quietly.

"I know," I said, before she could finish. "I know exactly what you're about to say. I feel it too. I've felt it for years, if I'm honest with you the way we've always promised to be honest with each other."

“So what do we do with that?" she asked, and for the first time in two years, her voice actually trembled asking me a question.

I was quiet for a long moment, thinking, choosing my next words with unusual care. "We do what we've always done," I finally said.

"We say it out loud, so it can't turn into something we're ashamed of. And then we choose again, like we've chosen every single time before this, to protect what we already have. Both of us have people who trust us. People who deserve better than us pretending this feeling doesn't exist. So we don't pretend. We just also don't act on it. That's the whole discipline. That's always been the whole discipline."

She let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding, something between relief and disappointment, both true at once. "That's a very mature answer for one o'clock in the morning."

"I've had two years of practice," I said, and finally, the tension broke into something softer, something safer; a tired, honest smile passing between two people who had just walked right up to the edge of something and chosen, together, to step back.

Neither of us hid what happened in Enugu. That, too, was the discipline.

Folake told Rotimi everything the night she got back, the tired confession on the hotel couch, the honesty neither of them had planned to speak out loud, the choice they'd made together to protect what already existed instead of chasing something new.

She told him because hiding it would have made it something shameful, and she refused to let her five years of real friendship curdle into a secret.

Rotimi listened to all of it, quiet, the way he always was. When she finished, he didn't explode, and he didn't perform forgiveness either. He just asked one question.

"Do I need to be worried?"

"No," she said, and meant it completely. "You need to know that I chose you. Always. Not because nothing else was ever possible. Because you're what I actually want, even when something else was standing right in front of me, asking the same question I was asking myself."

He thought about that for a long time. Then he said the thing that told her, finally and completely, that she'd chosen the right man.

"Then I trust you enough to let the friendship stay exactly what it's always been. I'm not scared of a feeling you both had the discipline to name and walk away from. I'd be a lot more scared of the version where you hid it from me instead."

I told Stella the same story, almost word for word, that same week. She reacted almost exactly like Rotimi did; quiet at first, then steady, then oddly proud of me, in the way people are proud of someone who did the hard, honest thing instead of the easy, silent one.

A year later, the four of us sat together at a rooftop bar in Ikoyi, the same one, actually, though nobody planned it that way. Rain was not falling this time, but the weather felt soft against the awning, and the city was glowing below us the same way it always did.

Rotimi had his arm around Folake, easy and unbothered, a man who had long since stopped needing to compete with a ghost he could see clearly, in full daylight, whenever he wanted to look at it.

Stella sat close to me, laughing at something I’d said, entirely unthreatened by a friendship she understood completely because nobody had ever asked her to pretend it wasn't real.

At some point, Folake caught my eye across the table, the same way she had a year earlier. This time, though, there was no tension in it. No unfinished question sitting between us.

Just the calm, settled warmth of two people who had once stood at the edge of something and had the courage, together, honestly, out loud, to choose to stay exactly where they already belonged.

"Still staring," she said, smiling.

"Still thinking," I said, smiling back. "Just about something safer now."

"What's that?"

"About how lucky we both got," I said, glancing at Stella, then at Rotimi, then back at her. "Not because nothing ever almost happened. Because something almost did, and we told the truth about it instead of hiding, and everyone we love became stronger for it instead of smaller."

She lifted her glass. I lifted mine. And somewhere below us, Lagos kept doing exactly what Lagos always does; loud, alive, and completely unbothered by four people quietly proving that the strongest kind of love is not the kind that never gets tested.

It is the kind that gets tested, tells the truth about it, and stays anyway.

But deep down, I wanted Folake so bad. She wanted me too; it was obvious. Very glaring. We left Ikoyi that night in my 2025 Rolls, with brown interior, calm lights and gentle bouncy seats. The car moves, but you hear nothing, just a steady drive with solid sound proof and shock absorbers.

I didn’t know when my eyes kissed Folake’s via the rear mirror, and she winked at me. Yes, Folake winked for no good reason.

At this point, I knew we won’t be disciplined anymore. I could feel it in my Nsukka bones. Every strand of hair on my face could feel it. I wasn’t really focused on the drive.

“Do we care for some cold stone and kilishi? The night is still young and we need to bless our taste buds”, “Yes baby”, Stella said. There was silence as I was expecting Rotimi & Folake to say something.

“Of course, dear”, Folake said. Rotimi was on earbuds nodding to the beat of his music. Folake just signals to also get for him. “Alrightttt”, I said, as I stepped out of the machine I was cruising through.

Two weeks later, Folake was moaning in Veritas Hotel as I was thrusting without mercy. We couldn’t help it. At this moment, Folake didn’t think of Rotimi, and Stella was almost history in my head.

“TOBE, yess, yes, gosh…yes!”, Folake moaned. My whole body was on fire with dopamine. I didn’t know this was what I was “missing” for almost four years of “friendship.”

It was as if she was also starved. She turned around in a doggie position and clearly said “give it to me, TOBE… I wanted it so bad that night in Enugu.”

I wasn’t surprised because I wanted the same thing too. Work deadline just delayed it. And before you judge me, judge hormones first.

We had “fun” that night in Veritas Hotel. I think we just got tired of pretending. I couldn’t believe Folake could give a 10/10 BJ. She didn’t look like it. But at the same time, something in me knew that she won’t be bad at it either.

I got home that morning and hugged Stella warmly and kissed her cheek. “How was work?”, she asked. “Well…it was not as stress as yesterday, my love”, I said. She made my favourite meal; Oha soup with semo plus fish, a lot of meat and cold juice.

I felt really guilty, but I was able to hide my guilt and emotions. I looked at Stella. I looked at the woman I’d be getting married to, and cried internally.

Stella was way more beautiful than Folake. Way more beautiful. She had this unfair skin color and tone compared to many ladies. Her eyes were brown and bright. If she walked fast, something would clap softly and it’s not her hands. She was just as tall as Folake, so height wasn’t the problem. Stella was extremely fair in complexion, slim-thick, insanely intelligent and very nasty; yeah, she was a freak. But I still cheated…

I know you’d say “men”, but relax. She wanted us to remain celibate until marriage. Few months back, our bed usually beg for forgiveness for crime it didn’t commit. But all of a sudden, Stella wanted celibacy.

Folake called later in the day and said “You’re better than Rotimi. How’s tonight looking like? You have some tasks to clear at the office?”

I was silent. She hung up thinking it was the network. I put my head down, looked at Stella who was quietly streaming a mid-week virtual service. “Hey baby, I need to run along. The office called”, I lied.

I wasn’t going to the office; obviously. I don’t know… I loved two women at the same time. “Is this even love or lust?”, I soliloquized. Deep down, I knew what it was.

I understood Folake’s body, but I wanted Stella ❤️🧎🏻.

We were on our way back from our field trip in Ibadan. The whole excursion group packed into one train that had spent the entire journey making sounds no train should make.

By the time it finally pulled into the station in Lagos, the sky had already given up on daylight.

Not fully dark yet, but it had that deep blue-orange in-between that Lagos does so well.

You know… streetlights just starting to flicker on, the air finally cooling down after a day of punishing heat.

Somewhere past 7:00 PM. Maybe closer to 8:00 PM. Nobody was checking their watch.

Everybody was just checking how tired they were, and the answer, across the board, was: very tired.

We spilled off that train the way tired people spill out of anything; slowly, complaining, dragging bags that had felt lighter three days earlier.

The coordinators were already shouting instructions nobody was fully listening to, trying to organize 180+ adults into some kind of line, which is a task I deemed very unnecessary.

Then the buses came. Two of them. And two buses, it turned out very quickly, were not going to be enough.

There was a scramble, not a dangerous one, just the ordinary chaos of tired people trying to guarantee themselves a seat and a straight path home. Some of us made it onto those first two buses without much drama.

The rest of us didn't. We stood there, watching the evening light disappear down the road, left behind with our bags, our exhaustion and the vague promise from a coordinator that "another bus is coming, don't worry," which is the kind of sentence that has never once made anybody stop worrying.

So we waited. Under the station lights, which had that same tired orange glow every station in this city seems to share, like they were all installed by the same company on the same tight budget. Some people sat on the curb.

Some people leaned on the low wall by the entrance. I found a spot a little apart from the noise, mostly because I wanted five minutes where nobody spoke to me about anything, and I let myself just stand there, watching Lagos instruct its sky to close its eyes.

Then I noticed her.

She was near the back of our stranded little group, sitting on top of her bag the way some people do when they've decided a suitcase can double as furniture if you're tired enough.

Her phone lit her face in that soft blue light phones give off in the dark, and every few seconds she'd laugh at something on the screen and turn it towards her friend beside her, who would laugh too, the two of them clearly entertaining themselves through the wait in a way the rest of us, standing around looking miserable, had not thought to try.

I want to tell you I walked over immediately, smooth and confident. I did not. I stood there for a good few minutes, doing the thing you do when you've noticed someone and haven't yet found the courage to act on it.

I was starring, and looking away fast when it seemed like she might glance up. I was doing a quick, useless math in my head about what I could possibly say that wouldn't sound completely foolish.

In the end, it was the bus's fault. Or rather, the lack of one. Ten more minutes passed with no bus in sight, and the coordinator announced, with the weary patience of someone who had already accepted defeat, that the third bus was "still coming, small small," and that we should "find comfortable spot and wait."

That was as close to an invitation as I was going to get. I found my comfortable spot exactly three feet from her.

"Whatever's on that phone," I said, "it looks funnier than standing here doing nothing."

She looked up. Not startled, not shy, but amused, in the way of someone who had clocked my hovering a full three minutes, before I finally said anything and had simply been waiting to see if I would.

"It's a video of a dog chasing a man down a very long road," she said, turning the phone toward me. "The dog is winning."

I watched it. The dog was, in fact, winning. I laughed harder than a dog video should reasonably earn, mostly out of relief that I hadn't said anything foolish, and she laughed at my “laughing”, and just like that, whatever nervousness I'd been carrying around for the last ten minutes quietly excused itself from the conversation.

Her name was Chidinma.

Her friend, sensing exactly what was happening with the kind of instinct only best friends have, suddenly remembered an urgent need to "go and check something" polite distance away,

… leaving the two of us sitting there in the half-dark, station with noise humming around us, like the world had rearranged itself just enough to give us room.

We talked properly then. Not the careful, testing-the-water talk of two strangers, but the easy kind that happens when everyone's too tired to perform. She told me she was also coming from Ibadan.

She was conducting a research on “Food & Personal Safety Consumption Among Local Communities.”

I honestly nodded because I couldn’t even piece together what we went to NIHORT to do.

She told me how she survived mostly on groundnuts bought from a woman outside her hotel, who apparently recognized her by day two, and started setting portions aside.

I told her about an experience I had in one of the hotels we lodged in.

She laughed with her whole body at that, leaning back on her bag, and I remember thinking, very clearly, in that specific unguarded way you only think things at eight o'clock at night when you're tired enough to be honest with yourself: I want to keep making her laugh like that.

The dark kept settling in around us as we talked, streetlights fully on now, the station gradually less crowded as more buses trickled in and carried more students. I didn't quickly move to join any of them.

I don't know if either of us were even fully aware we were choosing to stay behind; it just kept not feeling urgent, not while the conversation still had more in it.

At some point she stopped mid-sentence, looked at me properly, not the glancing, testing look from earlier, but a longer one, like she was actually deciding something, and said:

"You know, this is a strange way to meet someone. Sitting on luggage in the dark because your school couldn't organize enough buses."

"I don't know," I said. "I think it's the most honest way to meet someone. Nobody's performing. Everybody's just tired and real."

She considered that for a second, head tilted, and then smiled the kind of smile that felt like it had decided something on my behalf too.

"Tired and real," she repeated. "I like that. Better than dramatic."

The last bus finally came, more than 20 minutes after the first two had disappeared into the traffic.

Headlights swept across the small remaining crowd, the coordinator's voice cutting through the dark with visible relief, everybody gathering bags and shuffling toward the door.

We stood up together, unhurried, the way you move when part of you doesn't fully want the moment to end.

"I need your number," I said, plainly, no dressing it up, because by then the honesty of the whole evening had rubbed off on me too.

She handed me her phone instead of asking for mine, already unlocked, and said, "Type your number instead. I'll save it myself.”

I said, “I don't trust anyone to spell my name right on the first try."

I typed my name. She looked at it, laughed, and said “is TOBE that difficult to spell?”

She added something after it I couldn't see, and put the phone in her bag.

We didn't get into the same bus. She ordered an Uber, but I hopped in on a shuttle as organized by the school.

I remember looking back once, from my seat near the front, and finding her already looking toward mine, and neither of us pretending we hadn't been caught.

I was literally “praying” she texts. I mean, people get your number and forget about it.

She called after three days and said “This is Chidinma, the lady who couldn’t spell TOBE at the train station”

I was having a bad day because I burnt my noodles while doomscrolling. But the moment her call came in, I didn’t understand what my heart was doing.

We talked for 44 minutes: 39 seconds. I could clearly remember. And that’s very unusual of me. There was a year I almost forgot my birthday, but how did I remember the exact duration of our call?

Chidinma was also in her final year, studying Food & Science Technology.

We talked about random things, and for the first time in my life, I asked a woman on a date. There was this silent confidence that she’d say “yes.”

At that time, I had just gotten a gig. So, money wasn’t an issue. I quickly bought Club De Nuit Sillage by Armaf ( I highly recommend if you’re going on a date ), got some nice shirt, shoes, classic and sleek silver Casio watch, tiny necklace that smiles back at any light and got her a gift.

I didn’t know I could be creative and thoughtful. It was as if I have been waiting for this moment. I took the lead; yeah, I picked the location and she simply said “See ya”

I got there before her, and immediately she stepped in, I looked up. It was as if my heart had a notification button that detected her entrance before my eyes.

She walked over to our table and casually sat in one of the chairs. But I didn’t like that, I wanted to do things properly. So I stood up, pretending that my own chair was stuck or difficult to move.

Noticing this, she immediately stood up too and came over to help me. As she stepped close, leaning in to adjust the chair for me, I smoothly pulled it out completely, positioning it right behind her.

For a brief moment, she was gently caught between the edge of the table and the chair I was holding.

She looked back at me over her shoulder and smiled, with this seductive lurking eyes, clearly amused.

I wanted to guide her into the seat the old-fashioned way; the way a gentleman traditionally serves a woman by pulling out her chair, making her feel cared for and special.

The waiter came, served us and honestly, that was the first time in my life I ate a meal I couldn’t pronounce its name. During the lunch, she did something surprising.

“Here, open your mouth. I like to feed my man.”

My heart shouted: “Your man? Just like that?”

But deep down, I was happy. If you were in my black shoes with Italian sole, you’d be happy too. Chidinma was not just pretty. She looked like a work of art.

Her skin? It was as if she wasn’t in the same Nigeria as me. Let’s not even talk about her dimples as she smiled occasionally. She didn’t fix her nails, but they looked really clean and well trimmed.

No braids either. Just a well packed brown hair with curls. Her tiny piercing on the left side of her pointed nose made her unique. Of course, I won’t pretend like GOD didn’t bless her with sculpted abundance, full and firm, above and below.

After the anonymous meal, we talked for over an hour. No phones. No distractions. Just a honest and sincere conversation between two people who knew how their new “connection” would end.

That afternoon, I laughed genuinely. And as she laughed too, her dimples winked at me. My heart melted. Both of us didn’t want to leave, but we had to. We stepped out of the restaurant, walked down the park and had more conversations.

This time, I could comfortably hold her hands, and she’d just look at me, smile and move closer. She smells really nice, more like warm spring of chocolate with a good balance of sweet citrus; very soft.

Well… today, 20th of July, 2026 makes it exactly 3 months I felt genuine love again. We hope to invite you to our wedding ❤️.

Not because something terrible happened, but because life kept happening.

One day, you wake up and realize that the things that once defined you, don’t anymore.

The music you loved doesn’t sound the same.

The people you couldn’t imagine living without have become names you occasionally remember.

The dreams that kept you awake at night have been replaced by responsibilities that keep you awake for entirely different reasons.

And somewhere along the way, you changed.

The strange thing is that growth is almost never dramatic. t happens quietly.

So quietly that you don’t notice it until you’re looking at an old photo and wondering, Who was that person?

I think we underestimate how much grief exists outside of death.

There’s grief in outgrowing friendships, leaving a city that once felt like home, realizing your parents are getting older.

Grief in abandoning a dream you’ve carried for years because you’ve become someone who wants something different.

Society teaches us to celebrate changes; new job, relationships, country, identity etc.

But nobody talks about what those new beginnings cost. Every new version of yourself is built on the burial of an old one. And burials, no matter how necessary, are rarely painless.

Sometimes the hardest people to let go of are not others. They’re the previous versions of ourselves.

The optimistic teenager who believed talent was enough.

The university student convinced life would make sense after graduation.

The younger you who thought success would erase insecurity.

You spend years trying to become someone new.

Then one day, you realize you’re mourning the person you left behind. Not even because they were better, but because they were familiar.

There are friendships that don’t end with betrayal. They simply expire. No arguments. No dramatic goodbye.

Just longer gaps between conversations.

Birthdays acknowledged with a reaction instead of a phone call. Plans that never leave the group chat.

Until one day, you realize you’ve already had your last meaningful conversation, and neither of you knew it at the time.

Some endings don’t announce themselves. They whisper.

Dreams change too. At eighteen, you wanted recognition.

At twenty-five, maybe you just want peace. Maybe the dream isn’t to become famous anymore.

Maybe it’s to sleep without anxiety. To have dinner with people you love. To build a life that feels like yours instead of one designed to impress strangers.

That’s not giving up. That’s growing up. The internet makes this transformation even harder. Every day, algorithms remind you who you used to be.

Old photos. Old tweets. “Memories from five years ago.”

As if your past is constantly tapping you on the shoulder asking,

“Do you remember me?”

Yes. You remember.

But you’re not that person anymore.

And that’s okay.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

You don’t become yourself once.

You become yourself over and over again.

Each season asks something different of you.

Each chapter introduces a different version.

Some versions are brave. Some are broken. Some are ambitious. Some are exhausting.

None of them are permanent.

That’s the deal.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about continually meeting yourself. Maybe that’s why growth feels lonely.

The people around you often meet an outdated version of you.

They expect you to laugh at the same jokes, want the same things, believe the same ideas, stay the same person they first met.

But growth doesn’t ask for permission. It simply arrives.

And sometimes it leaves relationships behind.

If you’re grieving the person you used to be, don’t mistake that grief for failure. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost yourself.

It might mean you’ve had the courage to become someone new.

The younger version of you got you this far. You don’t owe them your future. You owe them your gratitude.

Then you keep walking.

Because one day, years from now, the person you’re becoming today will also become someone you’ll look back on with tenderness.

Not because they had everything figured out.

But because they kept going.

Quietly.

One small change at a time.

The second thing you see is the child.

And then your heart realizes something your eyes missed.

They are both hanging from the same shoulder.

One was built to take life.

The other has barely begun to live.

And somehow, between them, stands a mother.

There is a cruel reality that many of us will never understand.

Some people do not wake up and ask themselves what they want from life.

They wake up and ask a far more urgent question:

“How do I keep the people I love alive today?”

Not next year.

Not next month.

Today.

This hour.

This f*cking moment.

The privilege of dreaming belongs to those who feel safe.

The burden of survival belongs to everyone else.

Look at her.

Not casually.

Really look.

Look at the lines on her face.

Look at the stillness in her eyes.

That is not the face of someone who has had an easy life.

That is the face of someone who has learned that panic changes nothing.

The face of someone who has cried enough tears to understand that tears do not stop storms.

The face of someone who has stood in front of suffering for so long that suffering no longer introduces itself before entering the room.

And yet…

She is still standing.

That alone is extraordinary.

The child resting against her chest knows nothing about the mathematics of survival.

The child does not understand uncertainty.

The child does not understand danger.

The child does not understand sacrifice.

The child only knows one thing:

When I am afraid, I belong here.

Against her chest.

Near her heartbeat.

Inside the geography of her protection.

And isn’t that what every child believes?

That their mother is stronger than the world.

Stronger than hunger, war, fear, even fate itself.

The heartbreaking truth is that mothers know they are not.

Yet they spend their entire lives pretending they are.

For us.

There is something devastating about the way children trust.

They trust completely.

Blindly.

Without contracts, guarantees, evidence.

The child in this image has handed over its entire existence to another human being.

Everything.

And the mother has accepted that responsibility without complaint.

Without applause.

Without recognition.

Without even the luxury of breaking down.

When the world starts falling apart, most children instinctively turns toward them.

And so they become shelter.

Even when they need shelter themselves.

They become strength, especially when they feel weak.

They even become hope, when they are running dangerously low on it.

The rifle is not the saddest part of this image.

The saddest part is what it represents.

It represents a world that forced protection to become necessary.

A world that demanded strength from someone who deserved peace.

A world that placed responsibility on shoulders already carrying more than enough.

No woman dreams as a little girl of becoming hardened by circumstance.

No child imagines a future shaped by survival.

Yet life does not always ask for permission before becoming difficult.

And still…

The child is alive.

The child is held.

The child is loved.

The child is close enough to hear the rhythm of a mother’s heart.

Do you realize what that means?

Despite everything she has endured…

She did not allow the darkness to inherit her tenderness.

That is one of the rarest victories a human being can achieve.

Because suffering has a way of turning people cold.

Pain has a way of making people bitter.

Fear has a way of making people smaller.

Yet somehow she has remained soft enough to carry a child and strong enough to carry reality.

At the same time.

Maybe that is why this image hurts so much.

Because it reminds us of a truth we spend our lives trying to ignore:

The people carrying the heaviest burdens are often the ones saying the least.

The strongest people rarely announce their strength.

They simply wake up every morning and continue carrying what would break someone else.

Silently.

Patiently.

Endlessly.

Somewhere in the future, this child may grow up and remember very little of this day.

Memory is strange that way.

The child may never remember this field.

This sky.

This moment.

This photograph.

But the child will spend an entire lifetime benefiting from a love they were too young to understand.

A love that stood guard when they could not defend themselves.

A love that absorbed fear so they could feel safe.

A love that carried the weight of the world and never told them how heavy it was.

And perhaps that is what motherhood truly is.

Not the photographs.

Not the celebrations.

Not the compliments.

Not the flowers.

Motherhood is carrying unbearable things without letting your child feel their weight.

It is bleeding in places nobody can see while making sure your child still believes the world is beautiful.

It is standing between innocence and reality and whispering:

“Stay a child for a little longer. Let me fight this part for you.”

When I look at this image, I do not see a rifle.

I do not even see a mother.

I see something far more powerful.

I see a human being standing at the collision point between love and survival.

I see a woman carrying two futures.

The future she must protect.

And the future she hopes her child will one day inherit.

And suddenly, the image becomes unbearable.

Because you realize that every generation survives only because someone before them was willing to suffer quietly.

And if you listen closely enough, beneath the silence of this photograph, beneath the weight of history, beneath the burden of survival, you can almost hear the oldest promise ever made by a parent:

“I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

“I don’t know how difficult this journey will become.”

“I don’t know how much of myself this world will take from me.”

“But as long as I am breathing, nothing reaches you before it reaches me.”

Not abandonment either. Believe me, it’s not even the type that makes people post cryptic quotes at 2:00 AM

I mean the quieter kind.

The kind where your life is moving, people are around you, conversations are happening, notifications keep buzzing, yet somehow, deep inside…something still feels painfully untouched.

Like your soul is sitting alone in a crowded room.

It is terrifying because it forces you to sit with that feeling. You cannot run from it. You cannot numb it. You just have to sit with it.

What makes it worse is that nobody notices it. You still laugh at jokes, still reply messages, go out sometimes, post. You know… you still function.

And that is exactly why it becomes dangerous…because people only know how to recognize pain when it is loud, not realizing that the deepest pain happens silently.

Some people are dying emotionally in perfect attendance.

And the craziest part? Sometimes, you don’t even know when it started. Maybe it started the first time you realized nobody truly understood you or when life forced you to become “strong” too early or when you kept “swallowing” emotions because you didn’t want to become a burden.

So you adapted. You became emotionally efficient. You even mastered distraction. You learnt how to keep moving even while feeling empty.

And eventually, numbness started feeling normal. That is the scary part about emotional loneliness. It does not always feel like sadness.

Sometimes it feels like nothing. No excitement. No deep joy. No real connection to the moment you are living in.

Just existing.

Like, your body arrived somewhere your soul never did.

And people will tell you to “be grateful.” As if gratitude automatically cures internal emptiness.

As if a person cannot be blessed and broken at the same f*cking time.

A person can have friends and still feel alone. You can be loved and still feel emotionally disconnected. You can even be successful and still secretly wonder, “Why do I still feel this empty?”

Loneliness is not always the absence of people, sometimes, it is the absence of yourself.

And once you experience that kind of loneliness for too long, you begin to change. You stop explaining yourself. You stop opening up fully. You stop expecting people to understand.

You begin carrying entire emotional wars internally because it feels easier than trying to translate them into words.

That’s why some people become addicted to noise. Music always playing. Constant scrolling. Always working. Always consuming something.

Silence becomes unbearable when your mind is the loudest room you know. And maybe that is what terrifies people the most.

Not being alone physically, but being left alone with their own thoughts.

If you look underneath all the distractions, many people are carrying unresolved grief, buried anger, invisible insecurities, and versions of themselves they abandoned just to survive.

And every once in a while, usually late at night, it catches up to them, like it just caught up with me.

That random heavy feeling. That emotional crash after a long day. You know…that moment where everything suddenly feels meaningless for no clear reason.

That’s not weakness.

That’s emotional exhaustion finally begging to be acknowledged. Not everything can be healed by distraction, money [ yes, money], relationships, or success. Some emptiness is deeper than sadness, it is spiritual starvation.

And maybe the reason nothing satisfies anymore is because your soul is searching for something eternal.

Find Jesus Christ ❤️.

We say we want love, but what we really want is control.

We want someone who will not leave, change or expose the parts of us we’ve spent years hiding.

AND THAT’S NOT LOVE !

That is comfort dressed up in romance. Real love is disruptive. It walks into your life and starts touching things you thought were settled. It questions your patterns and ruins your carefully constructed emotional defenses.

It doesn’t just hold you. It sees you. And being seen like that? It’s actually terrifying.

…because now, there is nowhere left to hide.

We pretend love is gentle, well…sometimes it is. But sometimes, it is confrontation.

It is someone looking you right in the eyes and refusing to participate in your illusions.

Refusing to accept the half-baked version of you that you present to the world. It demands more in a way that forces you to meet yourself honestly.

Here’s the part people won’t say out loud; most relationships are not built on love.

They are built on convenience. On timing. On mutual loneliness.

This is a critical perspective, not a universal truth.

Two people meet at the right moment, need each other just enough, and call it love because it feels easier than questioning it.

But real love?

Real love will cost you something; your ego, control, guard, and your ability to remain unchanged.

It will ask you to grow in ways that feel uncomfortable, and force you to confront the parts of yourself that you were once allowed to ignore.

And sometimes, this is the most controversial part: love is not enough to make people stay.

Not because the feeling isn’t real. But because the people involved are not ready to carry what love requires.

I have seen people love each other deeply…and still walk away.

Not out of lack, but of inability. Love is not just a feeling. It is capacity. The capacity to be honest. To be vulnerable. To stay present even when things get hard.

And maybe that’s the truth we keep avoiding. We don’t just lose people because love fades. Sometimes, we lose them because we were not ready to love them properly.

So when you say you want love…be careful.

…Because love will NOT just give you butterflies. It will give you mirrors. NOT the kind you admire yourself in, but the kind that shows you everything you’ve been trying not to see.

If you’re not ready for that? You won’t recognize love when it comes. You’ll call it “too much“ or “too intense” or even “too complicated.”

And you’ll walk away into something easier and quieter. You know…something that asks less of you.

But deep down, you will always remember what it felt like to be loved in a way that didn’t just touch your body, but demanded your truth.

BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU CALL LOVE ❤️

There’s a dangerous beauty in lust. It seduces you into believing that you are alive in a way that only love could sustain. Your body forgets time; your heart races; your soul flutters in borrowed wings.

But when the morning comes, when the sheets cools off and your lover is gone or distant, you feel it; the hollowness. Lust is an echo that never answers, a doorway you step through only to find a wall on the other side.

Love, by contrast, enters softly. It lingers in silence, listens to the tremor beneath your words, sees the scars you hide even from yourself. Love is the warmth that waits while the body sleeps, the hand that holds without asking for return, the courage to stay when everything screams to leave.

The danger comes when you dress lust in love’s clothes.

You say “I love you” in the throes of desire, thinking your words can anchor what your soul already knows is fleeting. You give yourself wholly, not knowing that the person in front of you only wanted pieces, and those pieces will be returned with interest in heartbreak.

The heart does not lie. The soul does not forget. And when lust masquerades as love, it leaves wounds deeper than any rejection, scars that whisper every time someone touches you again.

There is a moment, fleeting and quiet, where you can tell the difference. It comes in the pause before your lips meet theirs, in the look that lingers too long in their fucking eyes, in the silence that says more than words.

It is in asking yourself: “Am I here because I love them? Or because I want them to fill a hole in me I’ve never been brave enough to face?”

If it’s the latter, stop. Stop before the hurt blooms, before your touch becomes a theft, before you leave someone carrying what you cannot give. Lust is not evil, but it is a thief. It steals presence, clarity, and sometimes, innocence.

Love gives without taking, gives with reverence, and leaves your soul lighter for having touched another.

When you learn to distinguish the two, you save lives. You save your own. You recognize that the difference between being wanted and being loved is not in the climax or the moan, but in the honesty of your gaze, the patience of your hands, and the courage of your heart.

The truth is brutal: lust can feel like love, but it rarely lasts. Love, in its messy, imperfect, holy way, endures.

And if you ignore the difference, you risk walking through a thousand beds and still waking alone.

So, before you let someone inside you again, ask: am I touching their body, or their soul? And am I ready to see the answer?

Honestly, lust can burn beautifully, but love is what heals. And sometimes, the fire leaves only ash where love could have left a home.