The Tales Of Breakfast In Nigeria 🇳🇬 || 2023

🇳🇬 | Chapter 003

If we ever meet again, only one of us will leave the encounter unharmed.

If I don't kill you, I will leave a mark so deep and prominent on your body, people will cross the road for you.

Anybody with sense will look at the mark and know that only a worthless person will do something deserving of such a scar.

They will be as pitiless with you as you were with me for four years, Dele.

The anger that has been boiling my blood since the year you disappeared will never be cooled until I inflict the same pain on you.

We met when we were both trying to find our paths in life. You were a twenty-seven-year old mechanic at John Holt and I was twenty-five years old.

We sat side by side on the BRT bus from Jibowu to Abule Egba.

I was so tired from working that day at my cleaning job in General Hospital, Sabo, that I fell asleep on your shoulder.

Maybe for other people my job would have been something shameful.

But I can never be ashamed of making my own money. When the ATM brings out naira notes, they look the same no matter how you have earned it.

Besides, cleaning people's messes at the clinic was perhaps one of the most therapeutic phases of my life. Do you know why? Because everyone takes a shit in the toilet once they receive bad news.

When I clean up their mess, it's almost like I am helping their life make sense again. Shit business is serious business o, Otunba Gadaffi said so.

And that day I fell asleep on your shoulder was one of those days I did major cleaning at the hospital.

There was a girl who vomited her fears on the ground missing the toilet by a foot after the doctor told her she was unable to have a child because she had aborted too many times and no life wanted to germinate in her. anymore.

Then there was the man who held his son as the doctor told them they had to amputate his left leg, who now went into the toilet and messed it up.

He cried for his son who had not started living, yet had to let his leg go.

I kept the toilets sparkling all day so that people like the pregnant woman and her potbellied ex-husband could comfortably use it as a place to argue, to once again reaffirm the reason why they didn't need to be together anymore.

Everyone always leaves a mess in the hospital's toilets. I did not mind it at all, I found cleaning soothing.

It was not the worst job I ever had and I didn't look down on myself. I knew I was going to make it in life so I was okay with the many phases and curve balls life threw at me.

That day after my shift, I may have drooled as I dozed off on your shoulder. I tend to drool and snore when I am exhausted. Dele, it was tiredness that led me to you. I leaned on you, trusted you before I even knew you.

I should have chosen the other empty seat beside the woman who had a basket of stock fish on her lap. I just didn't want to spend hours in traffic inhaling the sweet smell of fish mingled with the other smells that filled the BRT.

So, I chose to sit beside the young man with the clean white shirt. Anyone who could keep a white shirt clean at the end of the day in Lagos deserved a standing ovation.

But I should have known that any man who could keep a clean white shirt at the end of a Lagos work day would be dangerous. If I had chosen to sit beside the other woman, perhaps our journeys would have been different.