Eternity's Wake: Echoes of Us

The morning light over Abuja was a cruel thing—golden, generous, and utterly indifferent to the weight a man carried beneath his skin. Obinna Chima stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his tenth-floor apartment in Maitama, a half-empty cup of black coffee cooling in his hand, watching the city stir awake. The traffic on the Shehu Musa Yar'Adua Expressway had started its usual crawl, hawkers were already fanning out across the kerbs with trays of groundnuts and bottled water, and somewhere in the distance, the call to prayer from a mosque threaded through the hum of generators and car horns. It was a Tuesday. It was just another day.

But it wasn't.

He knew what day it was the moment he opened his eyes at 4:47 a.m., before the alarm had a chance to lie to him. His body had learned to remember dates that his mind tried to forget. Splendor's birthday. She would have been twenty-six today. Instead, she was four years dead, and obinna was standing in a glass tower she had never seen, wearing a suit she would have teased him for choosing—too serious, she would have said, too safe.

He took a siphoned the coffee, grimaced at its bitterness, and set the cup down on the granite counter. The apartment was too clean. Too quiet. He kept it that way on purpose—nothing out of place, no photographs on the walls, no soft corners where memory could catch him off guard. The leather sofa was black, the floors polished marble, the only art a single abstract piece in muted greys that his mother had called "depressing" the last time she visited. He hadn't disagreed. But he had kept it.

Discipline, he told himself, was a form of control. And control was the only thing that kept the chaos at bay.

He showered with military precision—scalding water, exactly seven minutes—then dressed in a charcoal-grey suit with a crisp white shirt and no tie. His reflection in the bathroom mirror gave nothing back. Clean-shaven. Eyes flat. Shoulders straight. A man who had learned to arrange his face the way he arranged his spreadsheet columns: neat, logical, unrevealing.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from his assistant, Kamsi, confirming that the 10 a.m. meeting with the private equity team was still on, and that the quarterly review deck had been approved by legal. He typed a one-word reply: Noted. No pleasantries. No warmth. He had trained everyone around him to expect precisely this.

But then another message came, this time from a number he had not saved but knew by heart—his mother's.

Obinna. I'm in Abuja. I'll come by this evening. We need to talk.

He stared at the words long enough for the screen to dim. His thumb hovered over the call button, but he didn't press it. Instead, he typed: I have meetings until late.

Three dots appeared. Then her reply: I will wait.

His jaw tightened. There was no arguing with Nneka Chima once she had made up her mind. She was a small woman with a voice that could cut through stone, and she had raised two children on the strength of her will alone after their father had walked out when Splendor was barely five. obinna had always admired that steeliness in her. But when it was turned on him—when her soft eyes sharpened into something accusatory—he found himself wanting to disappear.

Their father, Chinedu Chima, had disappeared so completely after leaving that he became less a man and more a wound. No letters. No calls. No money. Just absence. Some relatives claimed he had moved to Lagos. Others whispered that he had started another family in Port Harcourt. Nneka never confirmed either. To obinna, it had never mattered. The man had been gone longer than he had ever been present.

He pocketed the phone and grabbed his briefcase. The office would be a sanctuary. Numbers did not judge. Spreadsheets did not bring up the past. Quarterly projections did not ask why you had let the only woman you ever loved walk away.

---

The workday was a blur of meetings, deadlines, and carefully constructed professionalism. He sat through the equity review with his managing director, Mr. Adebayo, a balding, sharp-tongued man who respected obinna precisely because obinna never let emotion interfere with a decision. "Cold-eyed," Adebayo had called him once, and meant it as a compliment. obinna had accepted it as one.

At lunch, he ate a sandwich at his desk while reviewing a term sheet for a real estate acquisition in Wuse. He did not look at the photographs of his colleagues' families pinned to their cubicle walls. He did not join the banter about the football match from the weekend. When his junior analyst, a nervous young woman named Chioma, tried to ask him how he was doing, he gave her a look that made her retreat mid-sentence.

The ghosts he kept were his own business.

But as the afternoon wore on, the weight of the date pressed harder against his ribs. He found himself glancing at the framed photo on the corner of his desk—the only personal item in his entire office. It was a picture of him and Splendor at her university graduation, both of them laughing, her arm around his neck, her braids piled high on her head, her smile so wide it seemed to push back the edges of the frame. He had not changed it. He had not moved it. He had not even dusted it in weeks.

She had studied music with the kind of devotion that made everything else seem secondary, believing it could heal what words could not. She dreamed of opening a community arts center where children could learn music freely and find the kind of joy she carried so naturally. She had been fierce and soft in equal measure—a girl who cried over old songs, argued passionately about art, and somehow made laughter feel effortless. She was the only person who could crack his shell—who could make him laugh until his stomach hurt, who could call him Obinna, stop being a grumpy old man, you’re only thirty—and she had been driving home from a friend’s wedding in Kano when a truck carrying cement lost its brakes on a bridge.

The phone call had come at 2:17 a.m. His mother's voice, unrecognisable. Splendor is gone, Obinna. Splendor is gone.

He had not cried. Not then, not at the funeral, not in the months that followed. He had stayed upright, made the arrangements, held his mother when she collapsed, delivered a eulogy that made strangers weep. But inside, something had cracked. A fault line deep in the bedrock of himself. And instead of grieving, instead of letting the fissure open and release the pressure, he had done—he had sealed it shut. He had poured ambition over the cracks like concrete. He had become harder. More efficient. More distant.

That distance had cost him Ifeoma.

Ifeoma Okafor. The name alone made something twist in his chest, even now, even twenty months after she had walked out of his life. She had been patient beyond reason. She had loved him through his silences, through his cancelations, through the nights when he lay rigid beside her, unable to speak, unable to touch her, because every moment of intimacy felt like a betrayal—not of Splendor, but of himself, of the wall he had built. Ifeoma had tried. God, she had tried. She had cooked his favourite meals. She had read to him from poetry books she knew he would never finish. She had held his hand in crowded rooms, whispered I'm here in the dark, kissed the tension out of his jaw when he came home with his teeth grinding.

And he had given her nothing back. Not his grief. Not his presence. Not his love. He had let her love him, but he had never let her in. Until one evening, after yet another dinner where he had stared at his plate in silence, she had finally said, obinna, I can't do this anymore. I'm alone in this relationship, and I have been for two years. I can't keep being the only one trying.

He had watched her pack her things with the same numbness he had worn at Splendor's grave. He had not begged. He had not promised to change. He had simply stood in the doorway of the bedroom they had shared for three years, and he had let her walk away.

Part of him had wanted to fall to his knees. Part of him had screamed Please, don't leave me, I'll do better, I'll learn how to feel again. But that part was buried too deep. And the man who had surfaced in its place—the disciplined, cold-eyed executive—had simply said, I understand.

She had paused at the door, her hand on the handle, her back to him. For a long moment, he thought she might turn around. Then she had said, very quietly, I hope one day you let yourself hurt, obinna. Because until you do, you'll never let anyone love you.

The door had clicked shut behind her.

He had not heard from her since.

---

The evening came sooner than he wanted. By the time he pulled into the underground parking of his building, the sun had already bled into a bruised orange haze behind the hills. He sat in his car for five minutes, hands on the steering wheel, listening to the silence of the engine cooling. He did not want to go upstairs. He did not want to face his mother. But he had learned long ago that avoidance was a luxury he could no longer afford.

The lift carried him up in silence. He unlocked the door to his apartment, and the smell of jollof rice hit him before he even stepped inside.

Nneka Chima was in his kitchen, small and formidable, her grey-streaked hair wrapped in a blue gele, her hands moving with the unhurried efficiency of a woman who had cooked in kitchens far smaller than this. She had brought her own pot, her own spices, her own cutting board. She acknowledged him with a single glance, then returned to stirring.

“You are too thin,” she said. Not a question.

“Mama, you didn't have to cook.”

“When I start asking permission to feed my own son, bury me.” She pointed a ladle at the dining table, where a plate of rice and fried plantains and chicken was already laid out. “Sit. Eat. Then we will talk.”

He obeyed, not because he was hungry—he was never hungry, not really—but because arguing with his mother was like arguing with the Harmattan wind. He sat down, picked up the fork, and forced himself to eat. The rice was perfect, as always, rich with tomato and pepper, the chicken falling off the bone. For a few minutes, there was only the sound of chewing, the scrape of metal on ceramic, the soft hiss of the stove.

She did not join him. She remained standing, arms folded, watching him with the patience of a woman who had raised children through poverty, illness, and death. He could feel the weight of her gaze like a physical thing.

When he had eaten enough to satisfy her, she finally spoke.

“I went to the cemetery this morning.”

His fork paused halfway to his mouth. He set it down.

“I put flowers on her grave,” his mother continued. “White lilies. She always liked white. I told her about the neighbours, about your cousin who is getting married next month, about the new road they are building near the old house.” She paused. “I told her you are still working too hard, and that you have not come home in nine months.”

“Mama—”

“Don't 'Mama' me.” Her voice was sharp now, cutting through the quiet. “I have given you time, Obinna. I have given you space. I have watched you bury yourself in this city, in this job, in this empty apartment, and I have prayed. Every night. I have prayed that you would find your way back to yourself.”

She stepped closer, and he saw the glint of tears in her eyes—tears she would not let fall, because Nneka Chima had never allowed herself the luxury of falling apart.

“But you are not healing,” she said. “You are hiding. You are building walls and calling them discipline. You are pushing away everyone who loves you, and you are proud of it, thinking it makes you strong. It does not. It is cowardice.”

The word hit him like a slap. He rose from the chair, his hands braced against the table. “That's not fair.”

“Fair?” She laughed, a brittle sound. “You want to talk about fair? Your sister is dead, Obi. She was twenty-two years old. She was my baby. And I am still here, standing, loving you, even when you shut the door in my face. Is that fair? No. But I don't have the luxury of hiding. I am your mother. I will not stop loving you, no matter how far you run.”

He turned away, walked to the window, pressed his palm against the glass. The city lights glittered below, a constellation of yellow and white. He could feel his chest tightening, the familiar pressure of something he had refused to name.

“And Ifeoma,” his mother said, and the name made him flinch. “That girl was a gift. She was patient, kind, beautiful. She loved you. And you drove her away.”

“Don't.” His voice came out rough, barely controlled.

“She is too good for the way you treated her. She cooked for you, stayed with you, tried to break through your walls. And you—you let her go without a fight. Do you know how much that cost her? Do you know how long she cried, hoping you would call, hoping you would show up at her door? She loved you, Obinna. And you chose to be cold rather than to be vulnerable.”

He spun around, anger flaring hot in his chest. “You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what it's like to—”

“To what? To lose someone?” His mother's eyes were burning now. I buried the life I had with a husband who walked out on me. I raised two children alone. I buried one of them. Do not tell me I don't know.”

The silence that followed was thick, suffocating. He could feel the tears threatening to come—real tears, not the polite misting he allowed himself in private—and he hated it. Hated the rawness, the exposure, the feeling of the walls crumbling.

His mother walked to him, slow, deliberate. She reached up and placed a hand on his cheek. Her palm was rough, calloused from years of work. Warm.

“My son,” she said softly. “You are not a bad man. You are a wounded one. And there is a difference, but only if you choose to heal. Splendor would not want this for you. She would want you to live. To love. To let yourself be happy.”

He closed his eyes. A single tear escaped, sliding down his cheek, catching on his mother's thumb.

“Come home for Christmas,” she whispered. “Let me cook for you. Let your cousins tease you. Let the people who love you remind you that you are still here.”

He could not speak. He nodded, a single jerking motion.

She kissed his forehead, then stepped back. “I will leave the rice in the fridge. Goodnight, Obinna.”

She walked out. The door clicked shut. And obinna stood alone in his sterile apartment, the city sparkling beyond the glass, the ghost of his sister and the shadow of Ifeoma crowding the air around him.

For the first time in four years, he let himself feel the grief. It came not as a wave, but as a slow, silent drowning.

And beneath it, a truth he had spent years avoiding: that while Splendor's death had hollowed him out, losing Ifeoma because of the man he had become—that was what had hardened his heart to stone.