A young woman writes to her lover one year after his death
I was the first person they called after the crash. Not your brother, not your mum, not your stepdad. They called me and though it’s been a year and six months now, the fact that they first called me still makes me feel some kind of way. The day you died, we had just gotten off a conversation seven minutes before the bus somersaulted and crushed all of you in it. Seven minutes. You called me last, so they called me first.
I hated calls and as I always did when I got one, I grumbled on hearing my phone ring, but the grumbling ended the moment I saw it was you calling. I didn’t hesitate to pick your call. I didn’t wait for you to talk before I rushed into the “How many minutes has it been and you’re already calling me back?” question. I was taunting you, laughing as I spoke, my heart doing that weird thing it’d been doing around you of late. But it wasn’t your voice that spoke back, and I could hear screams in the background and right there, I knew it couldn’t be good just as the voice on the other end spoke.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
They told me, mixing English and Pidgin, painting vivid pictures I felt myself going faint. I was alone in the room as I screamed at the voice on the other end to stop. I told the person to call your parents and your siblings. You saved everyone with their actual names, so I reeled out names one by one for them to call, they’d remember one at least. I wasn’t going to be the one giving your parents the news.
I didn’t go to your burial. I stayed at home with your parents. In our culture, it’s an anomaly for parents to bury their child, they don’t go to the burial. Life wasn’t designed to happen that way, and you knew this. You watched your dad die of cancer and how his parents stayed at home at his burial, yet you decided you had to leave first, bringing the torture that everyone wanted left in the past into the future. I watched your mum walk around like a zombie. She lost a husband and now, a son.
Your brother, Kola gave me your phone after the burial, and I’ve not been the same ever since. Weird how your phone survived. The screen is a mess though. You have poetry scribbles in your inbox and lines that spoke of how you planned to tell me you liked me more than a friend.
You had scribbles, I had notes. You wrote that you liked me after that poetry slam event right before you graduated, I knew I didn’t like you just as a friend anymore that same day as I watched you walk back to your hall after you walked me back to mine. I wrote angrily in scraps of paper that night, sobbing in my room that night. This feeling was different. I didn’t like people who were my friends.
I doubted I’d said yes without first pulling your legs if you had used any of these lines for me, but now that you’re dead, I’d take anyone, the corny ones, the cheesy ones, the downright lame ones, I’d take them and say yes and swoon over every word like you were the best writer God ever created. I try to imagine you writing these words. Were you pacing in your room or staring at bookshelves in the library? Was I in front of you as you scribbled some of these words?
But does any of it matter now? Our story has ended before it even started.
The bus that you breathed you last in was taking you to the East. You were going to camp for your National Youth Service. I thought it was a waste, serving a country I didn’t care about. You didn’t fancy it either. You thought of waiting for me, so we’d go together. You could wait a year until I had graduated, you said. You wanted to other things. Looking back, I should have known your feelings towards me weren’t the same anymore. They’d changed, but in the end, life took preeminence and you had to leave first. If I’d seen that moment, I’d have asked you to stay, even if it was just for one day.
I hugged you the day before you left, and I cried afterwards. It was just going to be three weeks, but it felt like three years. My heart was heavy, as if watching a dream leave. If after camp you hated the state, you could redeploy to another, the one where we schooled, but it never happened.
Here’s what’s happening now though: It’s eighteen months after your death and I’m in a bus riding through the roads that drank your blood. Our dear country, Nigeria, posted me to the same state as you and though I said I’d never go at first, I thought of you. I’m not redeploying even if I don’t like it at first. I’m staying there, not for three weeks of camp, but for one year, for the both of us.
The woman sitting next to me is staring at me like I’m mad, I have tears in my eyes, but screw what people think. You would never read this email like the many others I’ve been writing but writing them and sending them to you keeps me grounded. I’d write you when I get to our home for the next one year.
I love you. I always did.
Love,
‘Doyin.
