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 dream is simple.
Get promoted.
Move to the Island.
Stop calculating the cost of fuel every three minutes.
Maybe find someone who likes me enough to tolerate my sarcasm.
You know. Normal things.
Or at least they used to be normal.
Three months ago, I died.
Not metaphorically.
Actually died.
For six minutes.
Doctors brought me back.
My family called it a miracle.
My friends called it a second chance.
I called it the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Because ever since then, I’ve been seeing people.
The problem is…
Most of them are dead.
Ancestors.
Forgotten people.
People who have been dead longer than Nigeria has been a country, and for reasons nobody has explained to me, they all seem to think I can solve their problems.
So now my life consists of software bugs during the day and ancestral emergencies at night. One moment I’m trying to finish a project deadline. The next moment a woman who died two hundred years ago is yelling at me because her great-great-great-granddaughter is about to make a terrible decision.
If you’re reading this journal expecting wisdom, I should warn you now.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
The dead keep showing up.
People keep getting saved.
And somehow I keep ending up in the middle of things I absolutely did not volunteer for.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since coming back from the dead, it’s this:
Every family has stories.
Every bloodline has secrets.
And sometimes the past isn’t finished with us.
Welcome to my life.
Trust me.
It gets stranger.
– Kelechi