Unsolicited advice to young Nigerian women working 12 joyless hours

My friend and I have been lamenting on how much less of our lives we seem to own under the stress of demanding work hours. She wrote this today and for the first time we felt oddly comforted by our grief and laughed at our predicament. Here's her advice to the rest of you like us.

1) when you start to think you want a life away from the office. Count your bills, spread them on the table. Sigh a lot.

2) when you tell your father you want to be a writer and he lists the names of 9 starving writers, add your name as the 10th on the list. Recite this list before bed.

3) when your mother asks if you can feed a family on passion, eat only laughter for a week. Go back to her and reply you can’t.

4) when you come across an old classmate on Facebook living the life you want, don’t comment. Click like.

5) when the madam at the office asks how you plan to balance your long hours and a husband, tell her men know how to cook. Laugh with her when she laughs at your reply.

6) when the older man who makes crude jokes at work tells you how ungrateful you are, and how he waited 5 years for his first job, apologise. Thank him for his observation.

7) when you call your friend who still hasn’t found a job in 2 years, don’t ask about it. Don’t complain that you work too long. Talk to her about the weather, about your new tailor. Joke a lot.

8) when you boss tells you that the your generation is doomed, ask him why he stares at you when your back is turned (ask inaudibly). Fix your eyes on his family picture. Agree with him.

9) when your American friend tells you you’re wasting your life, that you should follow your dreams, don’t tell her she’s right, just reply “I understand. But this is Lagos”.

10) when you dread the weekdays, look forward to Friday, sit at a new bar and reinvent yourself. After 3 shots of vodka tell the bartender about your life on the island as a photographer. Tell the man sitting beside you after 6.

11) Spend Saturdays being your mother’s daughter. Cook 4 different soups. Picture a hungry husband at your table. This is the life you should crave. Never speak about suicide.

- Because I was asleep when the walls started caving in

Do You Remember How To Feel?

What will you remember most? Years from now? When you're 80, absent and empty.

Memories?

Regrets?

Grief?

Secrets?

Blackouts?

Sins?


Will it be your first orgasm?
That felt like sudden rain
A rush of emotions you didn't have time enough to understand
You felt yourself release. Your thick woman fluid flowed down your thighs shamelessly as you clung to him.You were against the wall, legs wrapped with desperate need around him urging him deeper inside you.
You melted away like dissolving spray
Like mist into nothing
In that moment forgetting who you are
A virtuous woman raised by Christian parents
Head of the youth revival, member of the prayer force team
But you stood there, barely standing, unabashed moaning into his sweet flesh
the whole time
His name stuck somewhere in your throat


When your dad died?
How you cried like the women on TV do
Folding at the middle like a hundred naira note
Your mother didn't cry like them though
Instead she began to shrink into nothing
barely speaking, barely eating
till her depression killed her
Her death was a strange relief to you
You didn't cry
That night you said some prayers
It had been a while since you spoke to God
You thanked him for taking your mummy away.
It was wrong for someone to suffer so much
someone who was alive against her will.

How loving the wrong person changed you?
After that came pain that kept you up at night
Emptiness that came with waking up with nothing and no one
How he taught you how to make enemies of people
Because you couldn't bring yourself to understand
How someone could be so savage
After giving all of yourself
He left, leaving you broken with a swollen heart
You become ashamed and vulnerable
Remembering every dirty thing you made yourself do for him
How you were not woman enough to keep him
She looked better than you did
She had the right face, right body, right walk, right laugh
He looked mesmerized when ever she would laugh and run her scarlet nails across his face
Most times you grieved for being alone
other times you wondered if he had found what he wanted.

14.08.2015.

What was wrong with your first marriage?

You wanted just the boy and not his baggage

Not his mother who thought Edo girls were witches

Or his sister and her fake niceness

The thought of embracing new traditions weakened you

Pay respects to the Umuada for acceptance-

Bribing your way through their hearts-

Becoming a smaller version of yourself -

Because submission and reverence 

for your husband and his entire village was their watch word

You wanted the boy but he was too weak to be a man

He knew you were different but he wouldn't stand up for you

wouldn't stand up to his mother and his people

He looked at you with coward eyes that begged you to comply

when strange women dictated the rites of the marriage

Bear a child so they know you're fertile-

Renounce your people because they were evil-

Dress like a maid because you had become a man's property-

Before they let you marry their son

So you walked out because you had waited on your father all your life

And you'd be damned if you waited on another man

You had waited so long for something different 

Searching for a fire you could not name

You could not shrink yourself for them

Your dreams were bigger than him

So you left him because he chose to hold onto it all instead and let you go

27-May-2015.

Feeling beautiful things for the first time can be confusing
It always feels like its the only time, like that is the only person
that will ever love you
So you become silent, you settle, accept whatever, make excuses
Tinu was silent through an abusive relationship
Bola settled for being Alhaji's mistress
Ronke accepted the disrespectful insulting words of her husband even in front of their guests on his 50th birthday celebration
Ayo made excuses for her husband, when he came home late, drunk and reeking of another woman.
The first time isn't the last time, so do not hold on to someone who doesn't love you enough, respect you enough.

Some of us, have never really felt  love, joy, pure attention, real connection.
To some of us, life is a wilderness, loneliness is family
Some of us have spent years, waiting to feel our hearts flutter
Waiting to be called someone else's
Sometimes we blame ourselves, make ourselves feel less of a person
undesirable, unloved, not wanted.
Being in a world and meeting nothing that wants you can do that to you
Sometimes when you're at the edge of your own cliff, all you really need is a long deep weep in the arms of someone you love,
No words.
someone who loves you enough to hold you and understand
Your 21'st birthday wish was to find love, for someone to touch you in those places, for someone to even want to
You wonder how empty 25 years can be and how the fuck can someone go 25 years without being touched, without being loved like that?
Please, be gentle and patient with yourself
These feelings you haven't felt yet, give them time, they are almost here.

5-3-2014

She was where love came to die. Her heart was weighed down by the heaviness of their absence, each one of them. She made a room for everyone of them even after they left. She still entertained thoughts of them still and the lives she could be living if they stayed. It came from being too easy to talk to, from getting so attached too easily, from being too straightforward in a world where everyone did and said the opposite of what they felt.

Every time she tells her body no. She tells her heart not to. Tells her senses not to pick up the nice compliments, his intense eyes, how warm his fingers feel when they hold hers, the way his presence heat her up on the inside, the way his lips welcomes hers to deeper intimacy when he kisses her goodnight.

Sam was honey. She didn't need to tell him she needed him. He was always there, doing things, saying things, making her believe she was not alone. Till he just stopped and her world stopped too.

Tony thought he wanted her. He found something dark and appealing about her silence, her eager eyes, the nakedness of her words. He found himself exhausted on the second day after they met. Messaging her became a chore. She needed too much.

Ron was a tornado that carried her in his rotating wind. He said the right words that had him buried against her breasts, his harsh loud breaths on her skin in tune with his careless thrusts into her. His was the shortest and the easiest to understand. She knew what he wanted, she didn't expect him to stick around but he left her devastated all the same, a bit less of the person that she was.

Love letters

My love,

I beg Sam a lot before he agree to give his cousin my letter to give you. I give him the money from my shop from last month. He is telling me to let him touch me but I not agree. He still want me to give him my something but I tell him it is you I want. I is missing you a lot. I wear the chain you give me before you go everytime. I wear it even to sleep and bath. I am afraid something is happen to you. It been how many months since you leave here to go Lagos and you no call Tayo’s sister cousin number I give you. Everytime I go there and ask if you call, they say no. You no write too, and I know you write well, better than me. I still have the poem you write me first time we meet. I keep it under my pillow to sleep every night so I dream of you. I dream of the both of us together and it make me cry because you not here.    
    Amaka and the other girls is laughing at me a lot. They say you leave me for city girl but I tell them is not true, that our love is real. That you will come back to me soon. I know they just jealous of me. Because you fine and you are my own. When you come back, I laugh at them too. I hope you is eating well. I want to cook pounded yam and okro that you like and give Sam cousin but he say no. He don’t want me to send you food. I think about you a lot. I think about the night before you leave a lot. The way you touch me. I hold myself to sleep and imagine is you. I want you to touch me like that again. I think about it everytime, the thing that you do me with your tongue. I can never forget. I not telling anyone like you tell me to. And I drink the herb you give me so I not get pregnant. Even my parents not know. Njideka, the palmwine tapper's daughter is telling people you get her pregnant. That you is the father of her child. I go to her house and beat the liar. I almost kill her and her bastard child. She want to tie you now that she know you is a big man in lagos. She that she open her leg to every man here in the village and now she not know who get her pregnant. I is planning on coming to Lagos to see you. I work on Aunty Ifediora’s farm for small money and I is saving money from my shop too. By Christmas I is having enough money to come and be with you my love.

Your sweety Nnenna.

26 July 2015.

I stopped living the day I discovered I was alone. He was still there, his clothes shared the locker with mine, his masculine scent still on the bed we shared.
But he didn't love me and I was alone.
He didn't notice me anymore, not when I started wearing make up or when I started wearing long weaves. He didn't drop a compliment even when i got alot of those from colleagues at work or even his friends.
He was absent. Silent. And that killed me. In the most unbearable way possible.
Her name was Sharon. He spent alot of time with her and when he was with me he spent it texting her.
He noticed everything about her.
Today he was texting her again. I was writing in journal. Something I began doing alot since the silence in the apartment seemed to be eating me up from the inside.
"What are you always writing in that your dumb book?" He asked uninterested,  taking me by surprise regardless.
I held out my open diary and he read out the words that have been fighting with my lips to be voiced out.
"I hope for a day that I would write and my words would bewitch you, hold you down like a spell, make you mine. I hope for a day you wouldn't want to leave, not for her big tits or her light skin. I hope for a day your soul would be fettered to mine, bound in deep devotion, blood vessels entwined together, destinies merged. I hope for a day that I wouldn't have to need you, because you would be mine. I hope for a day your silence wouldn't make my heart palpitate and leave me broken, struggling to breathe, struggling to live."
The look in his eyes told me I was late. That he had left a long time ago.
I took my book and started scribbling again.
"Where do heart breakers burn? They steal souls, making living impossible. Living will feel disorienting, like wearing a shirt inside out. It is like murder. And murderers burn."