UCHENNA ONYISHI

Kosisochi, I have never been very good for you. I knew that was the simple truth. And though you did not expect much from me, and was satisfied with the little I was willing to give to you, I knew I had only afforded you the worst versions of myself.

I have boarded the last Air Peace from Enugu to Lagos. All of the last few years are hurrying back to me like a last minute warning. I am on my way to pick up your engagement ring.

I am thinking a lot about you. About the first time I met you, and about all the things that are waiting for us on the other side of me getting on my knees, and giving you what you have always asked of me. I am thinking about the relief on your mother’s face when I shared my plans with her. How she wished your father was there to thank me for looking after their daughter.

And I am thinking about the muscles on my mother’s face. And how they struggled to conjure up a smile that was befitting of the news of her son’s engagement plans. 

But I was barely surprised.

My mother has always been very fond of you.

She wanted to know why I thought you were the right person to spend the rest of my life with; how much I cared for you, and how much of myself I was willing to give to you. She also told me that she invited you to come see her alone after our last visit.

She told me she could not get you to open up about us. That despite the weight you carried on your shoulders, you were only willing to share beautiful words. She respects that about you. How little you are willing to share with outsiders. But she worries for you. 

She thinks that a woman who sees me the way you do, will often ask little of me. And so she wanted to know if I could give to you more than you were willing to ask.

My mother has always been very fond of you because you remind her of her elder sister. She was meek, just like you, she often said. And for that, she died face down on her farmland, diabetic, and alone, while her husband and kids waited for her at home.

The pilot has just informed us to put our things away. It is quite late now, and I worry I will not be able to pick up the ring from Christabel tonight. I have a morning flight to Abuja tomorrow. And so do your parents.

My mother said she would be there if I told her all the truth about us. And I did. She thinks we do not belong together. And I cannot help but feel the same after revisiting the last few years, in the company of a jury of my mother’s disappointed eyes and silent tongue.

The man next to me is praying for a safe landing. And I cannot help but wonder if you would carry on with your life if everything ended this very moment, for me, and everyone on this flight. Would you meet another man that would give you more than you are willing to ask for, or would you surrender yourself to him as you did to me.

The plane landed well. And I am waiting for Ayọ and the car at arrivals. He should have been here already. 

Kosi, I do not want you to end up like my aunt. I hate my uncle and my cousins for it everyday.

But it is important you understand that I need you. I have needed you from the very first time you drove to my place in Utako with food during your lunch break at work. And I still need you now, and may never stop needing you. And I know it is selfish of me to want to spend my life with you for all the things that you are willing to do for me. But I have always been very honest about the limits of my feelings for you.

I have waited all these years for you to walk away from us, and you are still here. Perhaps this is so because in a moment of weakness I asked you to never leave me. Perhaps it is because your legs have forgotten how to run from the things that will destroy you.

Whatever the reason, it is only right that I offer you another chance to walk away from me, before I ask you to spend the rest of your life with the lesser half of me.

Ayọ is here now. I should go. I will call you when I get back.

Munachi Achebe.