THE MAN I PROMISED TO BECOME

I never really pictured you in my life.

Not like this, anyway.

But the thought of doing the rest of my life without you felt like a death sentence.

I stared at the message on my screen for what felt like an eternity.

I try to console myself with the thought that our story hasn't ended. Because no matter how hard I try to love someone else, the more I realize that you were unique.

I stopped typing.

Then I added:

And I curse myself every day for not being patient. I guess I was blinded by what money could offer.

I almost laughed at myself.

How stupid could I have been?

By the way, why stay faithful to someone I'm not even dating when I can bag other chicks?

That was the kind of thing I had told myself back then.

I had convinced myself that love could wait.

That success couldn't.

That there would always be another girl.

Another opportunity.

Another chance.

But somehow, there was never another her.

I had finished the message, but my thumb refused to press send.

What if she misunderstood me?

What if she sent it to her friends and they all laughed at me?

What if she had already moved on?

I stared at her name at the top of the screen.

My heart wanted me to send it.

My pride told me to delete it.

And somewhere between the two, I remained stuck.

The truth was, I still hadn't found the money and wealth I had been chasing so desperately.

All those things I thought would make me happy had somehow become things I was still running after.

And from the way things looked now, she was in a better place.

She had moved on.

She was doing well.

So why would she even give a fuck about me?

I locked my phone and dropped it beside me.

For a few seconds, I convinced myself that I was okay.

Then I picked it up again.

The message was still there.

Unsent.

Just like all the things I should have said when I still had the chance.

Before Chidera became the man staring at an unsent message on his phone, he was just a boy growing up in a small town in Umuahia, Abia State.

He was the first of two children, with a younger sister who would eventually become one of the most important people in his life.

His father left when Chidera was only four.

He was too young to understand what it meant. There were no memories of long conversations, no clear picture of the man his father had been, and certainly no understanding of why he had gone.

For Chidera, his father simply became a blank space in his childhood.

But strangely enough, Chidera never grew up feeling empty.

His mother became everything.

She was the parent who stayed, the person who worried about him, encouraged him, corrected him, prayed for him, and made sure he never felt as though something was missing.

Beyond his home, there was also the church.

Growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist, Chidera was surrounded by people who became more than family friends. They became a community. They watched him grow, celebrated his achievements, corrected him when necessary, and gave him the kind of affection that made it difficult for him to understand that he was supposed to feel incomplete without a father.

His sister, however, experienced things differently.

As she grew older, the absence of their father became more noticeable. There were certain questions Chidera didn't ask and certain wounds he didn't know she carried. She needed her father in ways he couldn't completely understand.

Chidera, meanwhile, was becoming the boy everyone expected great things from.

He was intelligent.

Very intelligent.

Throughout his primary education, he was consistently at the top of his class. Teachers admired him. Adults spoke about his potential. To the people around him, his future seemed almost predictable.

But somewhere in those seemingly perfect years, something happened that would leave a scar he would carry long after he had forgotten most of the details of childhood.

In his third year of primary school, Chidera found himself at the center of an accusation involving one of his female classmates.

She had developed feelings for him, feelings he was too young and inexperienced to understand. Chidera didn't see her the same way. He barely understood what those emotions meant, let alone how deeply they could affect another person.

Then came the accusation.

For a child who had barely begun to understand the world, being accused of something so serious was terrifying.

Adults suddenly looked at him differently.

Questions were asked.

Whispers followed him.

Something that should have been an ordinary chapter of childhood became an experience that left him frightened, confused, and deeply affected.

He survived it, but he didn't simply forget it.

Some experiences leave the body long before they leave the mind.

Years later, Chidera would still remember how powerless he had felt.

Then came secondary school.

Boarding school changed everything.

For the first time, Chidera was away from home and surrounded by people from different backgrounds, personalities, and dreams. He made friendships that would influence the direction of his life. He learned how people could shape you without even realizing it.

And somewhere in those school years, something happened that was completely different from the fear of his childhood.

He fell in love.

Or at least, what a young Chidera understood as love.

She was lively.

She was fun.

And she could sing.

That was what drew him to her at first.

They could spend hours together singing, laughing, talking about things that seemed incredibly important at the time and completely insignificant to everyone else.

For Chidera, she became his first experience of a feeling he had never known before.

He thought about her constantly.

For the first time, someone outside his family had begun occupying a special corner of his heart.

He didn't know it then, but this was only the beginning.

There would be other girls.

Other relationships.

Other choices.

And eventually, there would be one woman whose absence would hurt far more than he could ever have imagined.

But before he became the man who would stare at an unsent message at twenty-six, Chidera still had a lot of growing up to do.

Before Chidera learned what it meant to love someone outside his family, he had already learned what it meant to be alone.

Not the kind of loneliness that comes from having nobody around.

There were always people around him.

His mother was there. His sister was there. The church was there. Neighbours came and went, family friends checked on them, and there was never a shortage of people who genuinely cared about him.

But there was another kind of loneliness he understood much earlier than he should have.

The loneliness of watching other families and quietly wondering what it would feel like to have what they had.

His family was not particularly poor. They had enough to get by. His mother did everything she could for her children, and Chidera knew it.

Perhaps that was why he rarely asked for much.

He noticed things.

He noticed when his mother was tired.

He noticed when money was tight.

He noticed the difference between something being needed and something simply being wanted.

Other children could ask their parents for things without thinking twice. Chidera learned to calculate the cost before he opened his mouth.

Sometimes he wanted something badly.

He simply wouldn't ask.

Not because his mother wouldn't have tried to provide it, but because he didn't want to become another burden she had to carry.

Nobody knew that.

To everyone else, he was just a child.

A bright boy.

A church boy.

A boy who should have been thinking about football, cartoons, school holidays and whatever else children were supposed to think about.

But somewhere in that small boy's mind, another person was already taking shape.

A man.

Chidera had quietly decided that one day, his mother would never have to worry about money again.

Neither would his sister.

He would become the man of the house.

He would provide.

He would build.

He would make sure they had everything they needed.

He didn't know how he would accomplish it. He didn't even understand what adulthood really meant.

He simply knew that he wanted more.

And so began his obsession with becoming successful.

The adults around him had made success sound simple.

"Go to school."

"Study hard."

"Get a good job."

"You will make money."

"Buy a car."

"Build a house."

"Take care of your family."

Education, they told him, was the key.

Chidera believed them.

What else was a child supposed to believe?

So he studied.

He studied because he wanted good grades.

He wanted good grades because he wanted a good future.

And he wanted a good future because, somewhere deep inside him, he had made a promise to two people.

His mother.

And his sister.

He would never let them lack.

At the time, he didn't understand that life was more complicated than the equation he'd been given.

Education did not automatically become wealth.

Hard work did not always produce immediate success.

And sometimes, intelligent people could work incredibly hard and still find themselves standing in the same place years later.

But Chidera hadn't learned that yet.

He was still a believer.

And faith was another thing that came naturally to him.

His relationship with God was not something his mother had simply forced upon him. Chidera genuinely loved the church. He listened. He participated. He prayed.

At nine years old, he stood before a full congregation and delivered a sermon.

A child standing behind a pulpit, speaking to adults who had lived far longer than he had.

People were amazed.

Afterward, some members approached his mother and told her that perhaps there was something special about her son.

Maybe he had been called.

Maybe God had a purpose for him.

His mother listened.

Chidera simply went back to being a child.

He couldn't have known then how complicated growing up would become.

He couldn't have known that the boy standing confidently before a congregation would one day struggle privately with parts of himself he couldn't explain to anyone.

He couldn't have known that there would be habits he would try desperately to leave behind.

Habits he would promise himself he had conquered, only to find himself confronting them again.

And again.

And again.

That battle would remain hidden from most people.

Because Chidera had always been good at appearing fine.

Perhaps that was one of the first things adulthood taught him:

You could love God and still struggle.

You could be intelligent and still make terrible decisions.

You could want to become a good man and still have parts of yourself you weren't proud of.

And you could spend years trying to become strong for everyone else while quietly wondering who would be strong for you.

But before any of that happened, there was still a boy in Umuahia who believed that life followed simple rules.

Study hard.

Trust God.

Work hard.

Become successful.

Take care of your family.

He believed those rules would be enough.

He was wrong.

He just didn't know it yet.