On a Thursday Morning
Ona Akinde
1.
Did you know we’d end up using this picture for your obituary?
I don’t think you did. I didn’t know that we would, and I know that you’d hate that we are using this picture. I hate it too. This is not how I want to remember this picture, because you were so full of life on the day we took it.
Your new job offer as a UX design lead at one of the biggest music streaming platforms had finally come through, and you had come to see me in my apartment in Surulere. You hadn’t shared the news with me yet and now I marvel at how it wasn’t the first thing you told me when you walked in. We were on my balcony, sitting across from each other, and the sunset that day felt like a soft kiss. There was a tenderness in the rays and a cool breeze that lingered, occasionally embracing us. Being there with you felt like an escape from all the ruggedness of Lagos.
Mid conversation, your skin caught some of the fading sunlight and I asked you to stay still so I could take a picture. You started laughing and I started taking multiple shots. Playfully, you told me to stop it; I knew pictures were awkward for you, but I interrupted to tell you how gorgeous you were, how stunning your face becomes when it breaks into a smile, even in the awkwardness. Before I was able to get any more shots, you pulled me into you and I let my body rest against yours. We both began to laugh, and as our bodies pulsed in sync, you whispered in my ear that you got the job. We laughed and laughed until the laughter turned to tears of joy because we knew how much you wanted that job and what this meant for us. It was your dream company, your income was about to be the highest it had ever been, and migrating from Nigeria had now become a stronger possibility for you. It was everything we had hoped for.
We went over the pictures I had taken in your arms, and I teased you because I could see how much you liked them. You settled for the one where you were looking into the sunset, your eyes filled with light and hope, your skin radiant, and you made it your display picture on all of your social media profiles.
Every time I saw this picture, this was what I remembered: us, full of love, of laughter, of joy. But now I look at it and it’s a reminder that you’re no longer here.
They are using it everywhere, in the news, in the tributes, in the announcements, and I want to ask them to stop, to let me keep this memory of you as it is. But it’s too late.
2.
Did you know that you’d die on a Thursday morning?
I have tried to will myself to believe that you knew that you would and you were somehow prepared for it, but I know that it is a lie. I know you would have said something. You died in a manner that was deeply unlike you. You always planned, always. Nothing took you by surprise because you were always ready. It’s why we were never able to successfully throw a surprise party for you. And how you never got caught in the unpredictable rains of Lagos because you always had an umbrella. You knew exactly where you would be each hour of the day because you were a sucker for routines and certainty. I could have sworn that you’d end up being one of those people who knew exactly when they were going to die. You would put your affairs in order, call all your loved ones to tell them how much you loved them, and then die peacefully in your sleep. That’s how we joked about you dying, at least.
It is because of how you planned your days that when you didn’t text me to let me know you had gotten to work, I knew that something wasn’t right. I reached for my phone during my morning skincare routine to send your daily reminder to wear sunscreen, and be extraordinary as always, and realised I hadn’t heard from you since your good morning text. I called you, and when your number didn’t ring through, I went into a panic. In the four years that we had been together, there hadn’t been a day when I called and you didn’t pick up or texted to let me know you would call me back as soon as you could. On all my forms, I filled you in as my emergency contact. You were always reachable.
So I started calling. I called everyone we knew: your security man, Boniface, your best friend, Yele, and Kamiye who usually hitched a ride to work with you. I even called So Fresh to see if you had placed an order for your usual breakfast—the Avo Spicy Chicken Salad. And it did not take long for us to confirm that you never made it to work.
3.
Did you know you’d go viral?
We had joked about you going viral in the past, but never for something like this. Every time you had a hot take — like that one time you said Beyoncé didn’t make great music — I would threaten to get your words on Instablog so people could drag you like small gen. We joked a lot about your tweets being taken out of context and ending up on the wrong timelines, and how if either of us was being dragged, we’d create burner accounts to join in the dragging. So it feels a bit ironic that when you finally went viral, it had to do with your death.
It was how we found you. A tweet saying that there was a runner badly injured on the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge, that no one had come to his aid. Male, dark-skinned, about six-foot-one in all black and bright orange running shoes. It ended in “please RT.”
When your brother sent me the tweet, I knew what we were both thinking but refusing to say so that it would not be true. But deep down, I knew it was you. The orange running shoes gave it away. I opened our messages, and pictures of you in those running shoes I got for your twenty-fifth birthday were scattered across our conversations. After each run, you sent one to me, the caption being the time and distance of the run. With each run, you were convinced that it was your best run yet, and I would call you my Ikoyi Usain Bolt.
During the entire ride to the Lekki-Ikoyi Bridge, every single minute of that two-hour ride, I prayed it was not you. As we navigated through heavy Lagos morning traffic, as I yelled at my Uber to move faster and swore at Danfo drivers to get out of the way, all I could think of was please let it not be him. I kept searching for tweets saying that the runner had been helped and police and health services had arrived. It was in my searching that I came across the video that confirmed it was you. A video of you, covered in dust and lying in your blood, your eyes closed and your fingers twitching. I screamed.
4.
Were you scared?
I want to tell myself that you weren’t, but I know you were. I would have been scared, too, if I was left to lie in my blood while it pooled around me for hours. You’re one of the bravest people I know, so I imagine that you put up a fight. That as you were stabbed repeatedly during the robbery, you tried to protect yourself — the gashes all over your arms were indicative of that. I imagine that you tried to get help, that as you started bleeding rapidly from the multiple wounds to your abdomen, you still screamed for help. But no one came to you.
I imagine that even as you hit the ground, you still had hope, that it was only a matter of time before someone came to you. You weren’t too worried because there were multiple hospitals within driving distance from the bridge. Someone would be kind enough to stop and pick you up. It was barely 6 A.M., but you knew people were about to start heading to work, that there would be other runners on the bridge, that no reasonable person would see you bleeding out and not stop to help. I imagine that even as your cries for help became whispers, you were still convinced you would be heard and you tried to hold on. So when did you realise help wasn’t coming? When did you realise that you were going to die?
As you lay on the floor, watching people run past you and cars drive by, fear must have set in. It hurts to imagine that you were scared in the last hours of your life, that this world didn’t give you peace and took away all of your hope. It hurts even more to think of how alone you must have felt, and I know how much you hated being alone. It was how you told me you knew you loved me and I was your person, because even when I wasn’t physically present, you didn’t feel alone. And I can only hope that in these last moments, you were reminded that loving you meant I was always going to be there, that you constantly had a part of me with you, and our love transcended physical constraints.
5.
Did you know you were loved?
My god, Feso, you were loved, unreservedly and wholeheartedly. Since the news broke, everyone has been talking about how we’ve lost a brilliant talent in the tech community, but you were so much more than your work. You were deliberate about living a life that was balanced, but authentically yours. It was one of the things I loved about you, the fact that you navigated the world believing your possibilities were endless. All dreams were valid to you, no matter how little or insignificant the dream was. That you saw yourself, not just for who you were, but also who you could be. You gave yourself grace to try, to fail, to just be my Feso, and watching you live this wholly was a great joy of my life.
They’re sharing your designs and talking about how amazing they are. People who worked with you are talking about how you were such a delight and a valuable addition to any team. They are saying how Nigeria is killing its brightest, how the country just keeps taking and taking, how we need to get out while we can. They are talking about how terrible insecurity has gotten since the EndSARS protests in October, the rise in daylight robberies, even in safer neighborhoods and the glaring absence of security forces. It feels like the government is deliberately punishing us for asking them to do their jobs, to stop killing us.
But I need you to know that even if you weren’t any of these things, your death would still have mattered. Feso, you were loved in spite of these things. You were loved simply for who you were. You were an amazing son and brother and friend, and you were the love of my life. We loved you for you, for simply existing and being in our lives, and I cannot believe you were taken away from us like this. I cannot believe that we never got a chance to say goodbye.
6.
People keep saying that things happen for a reason, that perhaps it was your time and you were too good for this earth, but I call bullshit. I don’t think a day will come when this will all make sense and I’ll understand why this had to happen. It didn’t have to happen. There is no bigger picture. It doesn’t all come together in the end. There is no deeper meaning. You shouldn’t have been collateral damage for this government’s inadequacies and recklessness. You didn’t have to be stabbed, you didn’t have to be left to die, you should still be here. I keep thinking, why didn’t anyone stop for you? Wasn’t your life precious enough? What could be the reason for this? Wasn’t there another way?
And when they say it was your time, how do they know? Because it doesn’t feel like it. The life that you wanted to live was finally becoming a reality; you had just started living your dreams. So how can they say it’s your time when you clearly weren’t ready? How can they say it’s your time, when you didn’t tell me? This is the sort of thing you would have prepared me for.
There was so much you wanted to do, so much you wanted to be. I can’t believe that you will never get to run a marathon or change how we consume music. We won’t build our dream home by the beach and wake up to the sound of waves crashing. Spending our mornings with long walks on the beach, as the sun rises. I won’t get to see you as the best husband I could have asked for. I won’t get to raise a family with you, and tease you about our children looking just like you because of your strong genes. I won’t be mad at it because I get to see multiple versions of you. We won’t get to grow old together. We won’t get to explore the possibilities of the love that we had for each other.
I keep thinking about how kind and gentle you were. There was so much tenderness in the way that you loved me and the people in your life. How being with you felt like a soft, warm embrace. The least this world could have done was give you a peaceful death, but you were taken so violently.
None of this makes any sense.
7.
I am having a hard time picturing the future without you in it. No one talks about this — what it is like to lose someone whose life was so intertwined with yours, who had become a core upon which your life stands does to you. There was an us, and now there is just me, without you. There are all these spaces you occupied in my life and with you gone, I am left with so much emptiness. All my life, I struggled with being seen and understood, but not with you. You saw me, Feso, you understood even my silences, and with you, I never had to question if I was enough. And I was happy. For the first time, in a long time, I was truly happy and it was largely because I had you in my life. You are the person I would talk to about navigating a loss like this so what do I do now that you are gone?
People talk about the finality of death, how absolute things are when someone dies and how they cease to exist. But since you died, it has not felt final; the memories of you have not stopped existing. I have woken up every day to deal with the aftermath of you not being here. I am struggling to come to terms with the fact that you’re gone, but coming to terms means accepting that you are dead, and how do I bring myself to do that when there will always be pieces of you living in my life?
How do I stop being angry at the world for carrying on in your absence? It didn’t take long for the tweets calling for justice to stop coming in, for the police to stop looking into the case because there were no leads. I couldn’t bear to see the news about your death be replaced by yet another tragedy, to see the world continue to function, like we hadn’t just suffered a great loss. Every time someone says they think I should start moving on and consider leaving the country, I just want to scream, ‘his killers are still out there!’ There’s no moving on from this. How can I leave when all that I have left of you is here?
I still sleep with the lights on, listening to Mereba’s “Get Free” because that was the only way you could sleep well. We would lie there, in each other’s arms, staring at the bright lights till we fell asleep. I take uncomfortably hot showers, even on the hottest of days, because of you. I make my smoothies extra thick because that’s how you liked them. I’ve been wearing my hair up because you loved seeing my hair that way. I haven’t turned off my daily reminders to affirm you. I’ve ordered the Avo Spicy Chicken Salad almost every day since you died and the one time they didn’t have it, I couldn’t stop crying. I can’t drive on the bridge anymore.
I keep waiting for you to walk in through the door and tell me you’re sorry you’re late because a crazy driver’s impatience had you stuck at a T-junction for over 30 minutes. I keep wishing to feel you hold my face in your hands as you tell me everything good is here repeatedly to soothe my anxiety. To hear my name, in your voice again. I keep wishing I could come home to you and find the smell of Baccarat Rouge 540 lingering in the air. I would give anything to have you sit on my balcony with me one more time and watch the sunset. We would stay there, in each other’s arms, escaping from all the madness of Lagos, but this time, I won’t let you go.
