A Letter to Remember (Episode 1)
Dear Tade,
The journey was painful; meeting you was even more painful. For it would have been better never to have met you than your goodbye.
The service year felt like a short journey down the road. Now, the service year was gone and you left without lingering for a split second.
I have to travel back home to Kaduna trying to forget you, trying to forget your cracking voice, trying hard to forget the snail we picked together throughout the service year in Umuahia and trying to forget that you said “I love you” to me under the Udala tree as we sucked the Udala fruit and enjoyed the evening breeze.
You took the Udala seed and said: “our child will be as dark as this.” I smiled, fixing my gaze on your dark eyes and pondering at the comparison, at the darkness you foresaw in our children, or maybe, in our lives.
Perhaps memory and promise didn’t mean anything to you. Or maybe, you were confronted with the pending decimals of lives and living amongst strangers.
At the garage, I sat on my portmanteau, dead to the noise there, dead to the voices of strangers, plying the same route as I was on my way back to Kaduna.
I was dressed in the corp member uniform with a bizarre smile on my face, breaking through the mascara on my eyelashes. But tears were breaking through my eyelashes too, soaking the mascara.
I picked up my bag and joined other commuters on the road to Kaduna.
I hope you will get this, Tade. I hope you will find this letter in your mailbox, even in your spam for I wrote it in a hurry as I journeyed back home.
For “home,” you once told me, “is a what really matters in the end.” I am sure you have forgotten about that but I remember it.
Always,
Tabitha.
…to be continued.
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