children of the fire must learn how to burn.

i tried writing fiction again.

i’m practicing how to tell stories that i make up, but to tell them in a way that there’s still raw passion. i really hope you like this story, it’s very me and that’s okay. let’s begin;

i’ve always loved women.

beautiful women.

to be honest i’ve always loved the chase, the idea behind it. the ability to want and to want and then go for it and get it. the bareness of it. how it comes from utter necessity, and how it can be translated as utter disgust. i’ve always loved the passion of desire. so…..intimate the entirety of it. to want and to then have after wanting. it must’ve been the way my father spoke to my mother; in such delicateness. always holding on to her like she some perfect object. like the china ware plates that my maternal grandmother had in her big dutch house in kano. the glassware she never allowed any of us touch. that was how my father saw my mother - untouched. unbreakable and disgustingly expensive.

i began to have dreams early on in my life, weird, odd, graphic dreams, that told me more than i needed to know - each dream came with two things; a win and a loss. every single time.

i didn’t like njideka very much. not at the beginning, she wasn’t very volumptous, not like all the ebony women in the magazines that uncle emeka hid under his bed. i always wondered why he bothered to hide them since his bed was literally 4ft tall. everyone could see them but in true african fashion, everyone ignored it. the same way we ignored aunty efe’s rising tummy. until it rose and rose and one day she came back with cheryl. my sweet but perhaps too light skinned baby cousin. i wonder where she got her complexion. everyone knew aunty efe’s glass skin was from all the bleaching that she did. did she somehow break the laws of science. did she transcend time and space and somehow destroy the continuum to have a white baby. “almost white” mother always corrected

‘she wasn’t white’

like that made a difference, like being certain of her skin shade would make it ok that we weren’t certain of her father or her race because she wasn’t quite caramel either, that baby was three shades away from an 80 leaves note book. aunty efe always loved men. i wonder if she snuck out her prey. i wonder if she waited till she saw the whitest man in the bar where she always went for her evening drinks. i wonder if she had a chapman that night as always or a martini- maybe in a bid to impress the man we never met, maybe that night she was different.

i’m not sure where aunty efe heard the name cheryl from. but she loved it. way before she gave my cousin the name she often called herself that. cheryl, never forgetting the R or the Y or L. a reminder that unlike the other women who wanted white babies she was ‘ different’ three masters down the line and PhD in view, aunty efe was so beautiful but always so desperately foolish.

i had four brothers but i only saw two often, the older two were shipped of to america by the time they turned 11. They were 13 years older than me and didn’t understand humor very much, well mine at least. the younger 2 were a pair of twins. charles and phillip - both names i hated so much only because i knew my ‘goody too shoes’ mother was desperate to be elite, i preferred their other names ugonna and uzonna. i was never really sure what they liked or hated; they mostly spoke in morse code, they had the exact same personality and exact same face too. what’s worse? they completed each others sentences and randomly broke each others left arm in 7th grade. same hand. same day - and this stupid boys insisted on the same doctor. there’s a presumption amongst my people that when you give birth to twins. especially two boys - one has to be bad. it goes on to an older tale about two streams, a tale i cannot now remember but with my younger brothers. BOTH OF THEM WERE BAD and you couldn’t convince me otherwise. two twin monsters.

njideka was the first born in her family - so when we started dating it was normal for her to want to be in control. bossy but not bossy enough to be called bossy. “will you not hold my hand?” “you cheater? i saw how you were looking at nife in assembly”….. and one time she asked her big fat brother to come to my class to beat me up because i wouldn’t do midnight call for a week. Njideka was a bully but i loved her. she wasn’t always beautiful. not in junior school at least, she wore her pinafore loosely and her socks ever too high. she wasn’t “cool” and wasn’t brilliant either…. but something about that break between junior secondary to senior changed people. something always changed.

we either became or did not.

and njideka became. so did her pinafore. a little tighter at the seams of her waist. a little shorter. her socks - high but not too high, just enough to leave a glimpse of her beautiful ebony ties. Njideka was hot. and i knew i was going to marry her. she always did her hair into big braids, mostly two and swung her waist left to right like the world revolved around it and truly it did. she had the type of beauty you couldn’t miss. hot. pointed nose. pink lips. Njideka looked like a bad girl and she was.

njideka began to date uncle lanre in first term, just before mid term, no one knew but i did. she didn’t need me to send 300 naira recharge card anymore. she didn’t need me to do midnight call or stay up all night chatting on 2go. that term i scored the highest in english, the subject uncle lanre taught. don’t ask me how but i did.

i met halimat in my second year in uni, she had brown hair and brown eyes and if you looked closely enough she didn’t look nigerian. somewhat so. she always had half a smile and sunken eyes- like she never slept, not enough at least. and maybe it’s because she never did, she didn’t have a mom not when i met her. her mom had passed three weeks before, maybe it’s why she always had teary eyes. halimat often told the story of how she wasn’t muslim nor nothern. she was named after her mothers bestfriend who got into a car crash on the way to her best friends emergency surgery. halimat - the product of that surgery. she made me understand how much love transcends, how love doesn’t simply end after a breakup, or a death. halimat still spoke to her ex’s sisters. she always bought them things from the mall when i took her there. she never had sisters and she was convinced God had given her the pretty little girls that called her ex boyfriend ‘aburo’; her sisters. whenever she went to the market. halimat ensured she always had enough change to give to every person who begged for alms and when they bent to appreciate her she bent with them. almost in a way to say - they weren’t less. their situation was unfortunate but they weren’t less than her. not today, not ever. i learnt compassion from halimat, she showed me kindness and love and the type that truly transforms. when phillip and charles turned 19. she threw a suprise party for them, simply because when she threw mine 7 months earlier she heard them whisper no one had ever done that for them. halimat listened- to me and to everyone… in a way my mother never did.

when i told halimat i wanted to become a politician in my final year she didn’t laugh at me like everyone else. she simply took out of her savings and bought me a grey suit the next day and said ‘to be the president you must look good’.

i don’t know when she started cheating. but i knew she was dating the senatorial candidate of the other party. and once again i knew what to do. i joined the other party, won my local government and broke up with the love of my life - halimat. she eventually married segun. they had three kids, charles, phillip and ifem. truly love transcends generations.

claire had a sleek back. i met her when i turned 31 at the illinois institute of technology where i was doing my second masters in cyber security. i like to remember her as the actual love of my life. i laid bare with claire, not just after sex. for the entirety of our relationship i laid bare with claire.

bearing in mind that she was my claire and i? her tobiloba. i liked how she said my name with such deliciousness ‘to- bi- lo- ba’. always over exaggerating the “bii” in between. she said she thought of my name like a spell. like a love poem and so for the first time in my 31 years i would no longer let people reduce my name to tobi. i would wait till my english history professor said to-bi- loba. pronouncing every single syllable after all if he could pronounce otto von bismarck, tobiloba shouldn’t be that hard.

my name wasn’t always tobi. it was ifeachukwu - emeka. i was called ifem. but when i lost my grandpa that had the big house in lagos island. my aunt began to called me ‘papa’ and the older i grew i began to look more and more like him, till everyone began to call me his first name - tobi, actually tobiloba. tobiloba translated to ‘the king is worthy of praise’ and just like that the boy they knew as ifem became tobi.

i gave myself to claire- most parts of myself. i intertwined my reality with her destiny because when you love someone and you know you’re not enough you give them everything. you give them everything till you have nothing left.

claire had a raspy voice, the type you hear in the movies, mixed with her montessori accent from her school deep in old ikoyi. a school i imagined had more foreign students than nigerian. claire didn’t experience a lot of nigeria, she left at 6, and maybe that was why she loved me so much.. in many ways i reminded her of home. she liked to call Nigeria ‘home’, despite the fact that she hadn’t been ‘home’ in 13 years. ever since the cousin she didn’t really like married her ex boyfriend.

i always wondered if she hated her cousin because she married her ex or if there was more to the story. if she had always hated her, but claire wasn’t like that. claire was soft and kind and compassionate, she told me if i loved a flower i do not pluck it, i let it grow and admire it from afar.

for the first time i realized, to love was not to own.

sometimes the truest act of love is letting go.

maybe that’s why i stopped having the dreams after claire. and for the first time i had to get everything done by myself. no more supernatural hand outs. i was clairvoyant but only clairvoyant when i had a cheating partner. i could only see the future when i was with a woman that was cheating on me . perhaps that is why for five years i sought after women i considered ‘baddies’ and when the dreams didn’t come. i’d become cold, almost angry at their choice. their choice to love me fully.

how dare you not cheat on me?

absolutely crazy.

in the beginning i couldn’t believe it. it had to be sheer luck. how could i have seen njideka kissing uncle lanre in my dream? how could i have seen every single exam question? how could i remember it enough like it had been engrained into my memory.

how could i explain that i only knew what party to join because i dreamt of halimat? because she wrote sonnets on the skin of a man i had called ‘chairman’. sonnets with lips and breaths. dancing between the heartbeat of intimacy.

he drew maps on her skin that led me to tears.

singing songs so loud they echo as moans to the stars. halimat fucked segun, hard. and i dreamt about it but i also saw the only way to win my constituency was to be under segun’s party.

every win came with the truth that the woman i loved was cheating.

so when i met claire i prayed to all the gods. i prayed to grandpa tobiloba and to the host of angels. i didn’t care if she was cheating. i never wanted to know.

how funny life could be- to love someone so much that you chose to sacrifice everything.

the dreams never came. claire never cheated.

at least that’s how i like to remember it.

wow. how was that? i just finished reading and even me i am laughing 😂😂. please let me know what you think and how is your day going joor my tobaby? i loveeee youuuu💘 talk to you soon baby!