Orlu, Imo State
January 4th, 2025
11:47 p.m.
Dear Osinachi,
I wasn’t prepared.
The night draped itself over Orlu like a heavy cloth, the kind that smothers sound and thought. NEPA had stolen the light again, as they always did when the air was thick with unsaid things. I lay sprawled on the cold floor, the kind of cold that seeps into bones and makes a home there. My phone’s glow cut through the dark, painting my face an eerie green, a lone lighthouse in a sea of darkness.
I opened the ‘Imo/Abịa State Men’ WhatsApp group, not because I had anything to say, but because the silence in my room had grown teeth. I needed the hum of voices, even digital ones, to remind me I wasn’t the last man on earth. I hadn’t checked the chat in days. You know how I am during the ember months, how my mind turns into a restless ghost, haunting itself with what-ifs.
Then I saw it. Your face. Boxed inside the sterile frame of a burial poster, your smile — the same one you sent me in that selfie in early December, the one where you wore that white ankara fabric and the sun kissed your cheeks like it knew you were made of light. But now, beneath this photo, bold serif letters declared your absence to the world, as casual as a grocery list.
“Painful Exit,” it said.
Osi, my fingers forgot how to move. My body became a statue, a thing of stone, and stopped breathing. I swear, for a second, my soul stepped outside of me, floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching the scene unfold — watching me — waiting to see if I would scream or shatter or simply vanish into the night.
Nobody told me. No call. No text. Just this digital obituary hanging in the group chat like a discarded receipt for a life already spent. I scrolled up, frantic, my thumb moving faster than my brain could process. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was another Osi. Another Osinachi. But then, I saw the same text with different accounts flooding in — “Rest in peace” — and my stomach dropped like a stone in water.
What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I didn’t know you were dying?” “Sorry, I wasn’t there?” “Sorry, we never met, even though you felt like home in a world that never wanted us?” We never had physical contact. We never stood in the same room. Your voice exists in my memory only as a series of voice notes: warm, laughing, always ending with “Talk later, ńnà?” — as if later was a promise and not a gamble. I didn’t even know your real surname until I saw it on that poster, typed out in impersonal black and white.
But here is the cruel joke, Osi: How can someone I never held feel like a missing limb?
So, this is where I begin, with a letter you’ll never read, in a language made of grief. If I can’t kneel at your grave in Enugu, then let these words be the earth where I lay you down. Let them be the candle I light in the dark, the whisper I send into the void, hoping that somehow, somewhere, you’ll hear me.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 5th, 2025
2:09 a.m.
Dear Osinachi,
Do you remember the first night we really talked? I remember now.
The rain was whispering against the window — that soft, hesitant kind, like God was testing the waters before letting the storm loose. NEPA, ever the thief, had stolen the electricity again, leaving me stranded in the dark with nothing but my thoughts and the dull glow of my dying phone.
I was curled into myself on my mattress, knees pressed to my chest like a child hiding from thunder, trying to ignore the weight of all the words I had never said to my parents. That was when the question appeared in the ‘Imo/Abịa State Men’ group: “Where would you go if you could be truly free?”
Most answers were predictable: London, Cape Town, Canada, as if freedom were a place and not a feeling. But then there was yours, cutting through the noise like a blade through smoke: “Freedom doesn’t live in places, it lives in people. So, I would go anywhere, as long as I’m not hiding in my own skin.”
Osi, I swear, my heart stuttered. I screenshotted it immediately. And I still have it now, buried in my phone gallery between blurry memes and forgotten receipts, because that message was a fossil, a proof that someone out there understood what it meant to be in a prison of your own body.
I slid into your DM so fast my fingers trembled. “Your answer felt like air. Thank you.”
You replied in less than a minute: “Nna, thank you. I thought it was too corny.”
Corny? Maybe. But it was the truest thing I had read in months. After that, we never stopped talking. We spilled our secrets like palm wine at a forbidden gathering. You told me about the first time you wrapped your sister’s scarf around your neck just to feel the fabric flutter against your collarbones, how your heartbeat was so loud you were sure the whole compound could hear it.
I confessed how I had lingered in Orlu market, pretending to inspect plantains while stealing glances at the softness of other boys’ hands, wondering if they, too, ached for something they couldn’t name. You said Enugu was too loud for your thoughts. I said Orlu was too quiet for me. And God, how you made me laugh even when I was breaking, because that night someone was outed in Owerri. My hands shook so badly I could barely type, fear slithered through me like a live wire.
You didn’t offer empty comfort. You said, “We’re stronger than the silence they try to drown us in.”
Simple. Certain. As if the truth alone could armour me. The group chats were for performances: polite laughter, half-truths, the careful dance of men who knew how dangerous it was to be known. But our DMs? That was where we lived. You called me Ńnà in that voice I imagined for you, teasing, tender, like we were siblings forged in the same fire.
I never saw your room, but I could map it from your stories: the curtains you once hated but later bought because it was within your budget, the mattress on the floor with a dip in the middle where you curled into yourself at night, the spot by the window where you balanced your phone just to catch a sliver of network or take photos.
Isn’t it funny? How could someone I never held carve grooves into my soul? Your last message sits in my phone like an unfinished sentence. November 14th, 11:03 p.m. “Nna, I dey go off small. My body dey do one kain, but I go bounce back.” I wrote back immediately: “Rest well. I’ll be here.” And I was, Osi. I was here. But you never bounced back. Now my phone is a museum of unsent replies. A graveyard of “Wait till I tell you” and “You won’t believe what happened” piling up in my drafts, addressed to a ghost.
Yours, in the silence you left behind,
Chinedu.
…
January 7th, 2025
9:12 a.m.
Dear Osinachi,
Do you remember the day when you said the dust in Enugu had started to feel like a part of you? That it wasn’t just settling on your skin anymore; it was inside you, grainy and stubborn, like it had claimed your lungs? You were tired. Not the kind of tiredness that sleep fixes, but the kind that sinks into your bones and makes a home there.
“Nnà, bricklaying work no dey again like before. The site is dry. Boys just dey waka round like stubborn flies wey dem no gree kill.”
Even through text, your voice was vivid… that wry humour of yours, turning hardship into something almost laughable. Almost. But that morning, the joke didn’t land. I read your words over and over, my thumb hovering above the screen like I could somehow press against the weight in your voice. My phone grew warm in my palm, heavy with the helplessness of knowing but not fixing.
You told me about the housing project in Ngwo, how it had been your lifeline until the money dried up and the contractors vanished. No warning. No explanations. Just empty bags of cement and half-built walls left to crumble under the harmattan wind. After that, you walked farther each day: New Haven to Trans-Ekulu, Trans-Ekulu to Emene, chasing rumours of work.
“Dem dey tell person to come tomorrow. But how many tomorrow go come before person go chop?”
That line gutted me. Tomorrow. A word that had started to sound less like a promise and more like a taunt. Here in Orlu, I felt it too — the slow suffocation of prices climbing higher than our hopes. Garri that cost double what it did last year. Kerosene was so expensive that we used firewood to cook. Even pure water, the cheapest means to assuage our thirst, had gone up.
I would stand in Mama Ifeoma’s shop, staring at the table like the numbers might rearrange themselves if I prayed hard enough. They never did. But you had it worse. You didn’t just want to leave Enugu. You needed to. “Even Aba sef go better pass here,” you said once. “Na Enugu dry me pass.” And what could I say to that? Where does a queer bricklayer run to when the whole country feels like a locked room? When every exit leads to another wall, another “No vacancy,” another “We no dey take your kind here?”
That day, my fingers froze over the keyboard. Not because I didn’t care, but what good were my words when your stomach was empty, too? What use was my “I’m sorry” when what you needed was a job, a meal, a way out? We were both trapped, Osi. You in Enugu, me in Orlu, arms outstretched toward a future that kept stepping back, just out of reach.
Yet, even then, you would always find a way to end with light. “No worry, Nnà. I dey strong like raffia. We move.”
I believed you. But Osi, raffia frays. Even the strongest fibres snap.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 7th, 2025
3:03 p.m.
My dear Osinachi,
I still see that photo when I close my eyes. Your face, once full of mischief, now sharpened by hunger into something gaunt and unfamiliar. Cheekbones like ridges carved by absence, lips charred like drought-stricken earth. And your eyes — God, your eyes — still trying to laugh, still trying to convince me. “Na just small hunger. I dey alright.”
But you weren’t alright. We had joked about empty stomachs before. “If hunger catch me today, I go drink water like e be soup.” But this was different. This wasn’t hunger as a temporary guest. This was hunger moving in, unpacking its bags in the hollows of your joints, settling into the spaces between your ribs. “I used to be bone and muscle. Now I just dey dry like okporoko.”
I laughed when I read it. What else could I do? If I let myself cry, I would have drowned in it. But inside, I was screaming. I wanted to tear through the screen, to press my hands against the pixels of your face and push life back into you. I wanted to bundle up every grain of rice in Orlu and send them flying through the network cables straight into your palms.
“Osi, biko, eat something,” I begged. “Let me send you 5K,” even though my own balance was ₦15,500, and the month stretched ahead like a desert. You refused.
“Nnà, I no want make you suffer, too. No worry, I go manage.”
Manage? What does that word even mean when your body starts eating itself? When pride becomes a noose, and every breath feels like a negotiation? That was the day I hated technology most. All these wires and waves connecting us, yet I couldn’t even hand you a slice of bread. I could send a thousand heart emojis, but not one real plate of food.
Then came the second photo. You, shirtless on that foam mattress with its guts spilling out, sunlight pooling in the valleys between your ribs like liquid gold. I could count every bone. Your collarbones jutted like unfinished scaffolding. Your stomach curved inward, a silent scream. “Na small thing remain make breeze carry me go,” you wrote. Then, softer: “But I still dey. For now.”
For now. I typed and erased five different replies. What do you say to someone fading before your eyes? In the end, all I had was the naked truth: “You matter, Osi. You matter to me.” Blue ticks met with silence.
Two days passed before your response came: “Sorry. No data that time. But I see your message. I matter. E sweet me small.”
If I had known those would be among your last words to me, I would have said more. I would have told you how your voice notes got me through my sourest moods. How your laughter in my headphones made Orlu feel less lonely. How you were the mirror that showed me I wasn’t broken, just bent by a world too stiff to fold. Now, the mirror is shattered. And I’m left gathering shards, cutting my hands on the edges of what-ifs.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 8th, 2025
5:17 p.m.
Dear Osinachi,
I’ve learned this: silence isn’t empty. It’s full of ghosts. I still turn that fight over in my hands like a broken phone, pressing the edges, wondering which crack doomed us. Was it when I said, “You could make your way out,” or when you snapped, “Not everybody gets the luxury to sit with a laptop and tweet activism?” The truth curdles between both memories.
We were starving in different ways. You, literally. Me, creatively and literally. Both of us are desperate to mean something in a world that keeps erasing us. That day lives in flashes: Your text burning up my screen: “Some of us dey carry block under rain.” My fingers trembled as I typed “ungrateful,” a word I would give anything to take back.
The way you went quiet after I said “condescending,” like I had thrown a stone and finally hit a glass. Then, nothing. At first, it felt like one of our usual pauses, the kind where we would sulk for hours before someone sent a ridiculous meme as a truce. I waited for your “Nna, you dey whine me?” or my “See your mouth like bad road.” Neither came.
Pride is a slow poison, Osi. I would open our chat, type “Hey,” then freeze. Delete. Try again at 3 a.m.: “You’re right about the writing thing. Sorry.” Delete. The words always felt too heavy or too light, never the right weight to bridge the gap. I watched you in the group chat like a thief. Your “lol” under Jide’s joke. Your “Na wa o” at the latest naira crash. Each message — proof you were alive, breathing — just not for me.
One month. Thirty sunrises where I told myself, “Tomorrow, I’ll text.” Thirty sunsets where I swallowed the lie. The cruellest part? We both knew how to end it. A voice note saying, “I no fit do without you.” A forwarded tweet about two men. Anything. But we let the silence fossilise between us, layer by layer, until it became a wall.
Now, I dream in reverse. In my dreams, I always send the text. In my dreams, you always reply. We laughed about how stupid we were. You call me Nna as if nothing happened. Then I woke up to this museum of unsent words. If I could tear one moment from my life, it wouldn’t be the fight; it would be all the days after when I chose silence over saying, “I was wrong. I miss you. Come back.” But some silences, once settled, refuse to lift.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 9th, 2025
5:41 p.m.
Dear Osinachi,
They announced your death the way people share missing dog posters — casually, simply saying: “Join us as we lay to rest our beloved son and brother, Onuoha, Osinachi Austin, aged 26…” My thumb hovered over your face, that half-smile of yours, the one that never quite reached your eyes in photos. The same smile from the selfie you sent me last year. Now, it was trapped under cheap graphic design, flanked by clipart roses and a Psalm you probably never read.
The group chat erupted in chaos for exactly seven minutes. Then nothing. As if someone had hit a mute button on grief.
I keep imagining your last days. Did you stare at our unresolved fight in your chat history? Did your fingers itch to type “Ńnà, ejighi m ahụ,” or did you fear I wouldn’t reply? Or worse, that I would reply too late?
Forgive me for not crossing the silence sooner. Forgive me for thinking there would always be a tomorrow to make it right. Forgive me for living in a world that let you disappear.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 10th, 2025
1:14 a.m.
Dear Osinachi,
They announced your death so casually, like sandwiched between a forwarded meme about Tinubu and a birthday shout-out. That’s the cruelty of the digital age — you become a notification. A blip on a screen that people scroll past while eating breakfast.
Did you stare at our unresolved fight in those final moments? Did your fingers itch to type “Ńnà, ejighi m ahụ,” or did you fear I wouldn’t reply? That thought keeps me awake, a cold stone in my stomach. I imagine you reaching for your phone, the screen light reflecting in your thinning face, seeing my name, and then pulling back, thinking there was still time. Thinking tomorrow was a certainty.
The group chat moved on within hours. Someone posted a link to a football match; another person asked for a loan. Life resumed its noisy, indifferent hum. But in our DM, the clock has stopped. I’m the sole curator of this museum. I scroll through our history, from the first “Thank you” to the last “I’ll be here,” and I realise that for people like us — living in the margins, surviving on hope and bricklaying — these digital trails are often the only proof we existed.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 10th, 2025
12:03 p.m.
Dear Osinachi,
The world didn’t stop when you left. Traffic still choked the Orie Ochie market road. Market women still argued over the price of tomatoes. Politicians still stole money with both hands and Bible verses. Life went on — loud, relentless, indifferent — while my grief sat quiet in the corner of every room, waiting to ambush me when I least expected it.
But your death was never just about missing you. It was about the rot you couldn’t outrun. You weren’t weak, Osi. You were worn down, sandpapered by a system designed to grind men like you into dust. They would call it “stress” on your death certificate. As if stress is what kills a man when his government abandons him, when his family would disown him if they knew the real him, when his body gives out before his dreams ever get a chance to.
How do we talk about mental health when therapy costs more than a month’s rent? How do we talk about queer joy when safety is a privilege? How do we talk about survival when it’s all we have energy for?
You weren’t just my friend. You were proof that staying alive here is rebellion. That every morning you woke up — queer, poor, hopeful — you were flipping off a system that wanted you gone.
Now, I say your name where silence used to live… in a room where they pretend poverty isn’t political. On timelines that scroll past suffering like it’s spam. To men who think their struggle is theirs alone. I weave you into my words like kola into a prayer. We deserved more sunrises, more inside jokes, more voice notes filled with your laughter.
But since I can’t give you those, I’ll give you this — my voice, sharpened by your absence, cutting through the noise. I’ll keep writing until the world hears what it did to you. Until “hunger and stress” can’t be casual causes of death. Until your name isn’t just a memory, but a movement.
Love always,
Chinedu
…
January 11th, 2025
9:22 a.m.
My dear Osinachi,
I never imagined I would become a keeper of a ghost or memories. Yet, here I am, night after night, fingers flying across my keyboard, sending dispatches into the dark where your laughter used to live. These letters have become my midnight ritual, my way of pressing my palm against the fading warmth of your memory before it cools completely.
Writing to you has been like unravelling a wound to clean it. Each word pulls another thread of grief loose, until what’s left isn’t just pain, but truth: you were here. You mattered. You loved fiercely in a world that gave you every reason not to.
This story, our story, etched in digital ink, is my rebellion against oblivion. I still wake each morning, reaching for my phone, half-expecting to see: “Guy, how far?” But the notifications from you have since stopped.
So, I write instead. I write because if I stop, the world might forget you were real. It might reduce you to just another ‘RIP’ in a group chat, another faded profile picture in a dead man’s contacts. I won’t let that happen.
Remember when you joked that day we were arguing about burial plans for a mutual friend: “If I die, no be only ‘gone too soon’ you go post o. Make I no become like forgotten username wey people tag for birthday memes.” I told you to stop being morbid. Now, I cling to that memory like a lifeline.
So, here is my promise: your name will live beyond WhatsApp’s servers. Beyond the ‘Last Seen’ timestamp. Beyond the way this country tries to erase guys like us — poor, queer, brilliant.
Osi, my mirror, my kin: you showed me how to exist unapologetically in a body the world called wrong. How to find home in another restless soul across state lines. How friendship can build bridges strong enough to span silence, distance, even death.
Now you have taught me one last lesson: That grief is just love with nowhere to go. That healing begins when we turn absence into art, your story becoming my compass, your memory my armour. Some goodbyes aren’t endings, but translations.
Sleep well, Ńnà. I’ll keep writing us into history. One letter at a time.
Love always,
Chinedu ♦
Ikechukwu Henry Chinude is an Igbo Nigerian writer whose writings tackle the issues of environmental and climatic crises, family dynamics, queerness, and speculative otherworldliness. He was fifth place in Christian Speculative Fiction Prize, Shortlisted for The Oriire Folktale Prize, and has stories published in, but not limited to, Naira Stories Magazine, Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, Lampblack Magazine and others. When not writing, he can be found searching for the next magazine to submit to.
