The Thing I Never Told You
The Thing I Never Told You I have kept this secret for eleven years. Eleven years of laughing with you at parties, of being the first person you called when things went wrong, of sitting across from you at that small suya spot on Allen Avenue where we always ordered the same thing. Eleven years of knowing that the version of me you loved was built, in part, on a lie. Let me start from the beginning. Chidi and I met in 2009 at a cramped cybercafé in Surulere. We were both second-year students at UNILAG, both broke, both pretending we weren't. He was printing an assignment he hadn't started yet, and I was watching him spiral into quiet panic, and something about that made me laugh. Not at him — just at the whole situation. The absurdity of it. He looked at me, and then he laughed too, and that was it. That fast. That simple. By our final year, Chidi was the person I trusted most in the world. More than my brothers. More, honestly, than myself. In 2013, we both applied ...