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I don’t know how I got here. One minute I was at the police station, the next minute I’m standing on a bridge. Cars are passing behind me, people are driving home, somebody is laughing somewhere, and life is still happening. How strange, the world didn’t stop. It should have. Mine did but everybody else’s
I wake up smiling, the kind of smile that happens before you even open your eyes. For a few seconds, I don’t know where I am. The sheets feel too soft, the room smells expensive, the air-conditioning is so cold that I pull the duvet closer and then I remember. My smile grows wider.Oh, right.
I have changed my clothes three times already. The black dress is lying on the bed, then on the chair and then back on the bed again. I don’t know why I’m pretending the dress is the problem. The problem isn’t the dress, the problem is where I’m going. A funeral.His funeral. Even writing those
I didn’t sleep. To be fair, if an old woman materialized beside your bed at midnight, eating groundnuts and casually informing you that a dead man wanted to speak to you, you probably wouldn’t sleep either. I spent most of the night staring at my ceiling and trying to decide which was more likely. I
Dear Diary,I returned to work today, which, surprisingly, did not feel like returning to war, it felt… nice. A month ago, I would have been counting down the days until I could get back to the office. I would have spent the entire drive from Chevron to Ikoyi mentally listing all the things that must
I can’t hear them anymore, at least I think I can’t. The pounding inside my chest is too loud, every heartbeat sounds like somebody banging on a metal door.My lungs hurt.My legs hurt.Everything hurts. I crouch behind a stack of cement blocks and press my body against the cold concrete.Please.Please don’t come this way. I
There is a particular kind of lie adults tell themselves, the small and comfortable lies. The ones that help you get out of bed every morning. Mine went something like this:You died.You came back.It was weird.Now everything is fine. For three months, I repeated that lie so often that I almost believed it.Almost. Three months
My name is Kelechi Nwafor.I’m twenty-six years old.I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Ikeja that is somehow too small and too expensive at the same time. I work as a software engineer on the Island, which means I spend a significant portion of my life sitting in Lagos traffic questioning my life choices. My
Dear Diary, There are moments when a Nigerian party stops being an event and becomes an ecosystem, today was one of those moments. As I am writing this, my feet hurt, my gele is somewhere in another room, someone’s child has claimed my phone charger, there are approximately seventeen coolers of food in circulation, and
Dear Diary, There are few things more dangerous than having too much time to think before attending a family gathering, particularly a Nigerian family gathering. Particularly one involving relatives who have known you since childhood and therefore feel permanently entitled to personal opinions about your life. For reasons I still do not fully understand, I