What If My Dead Friends Don't Give a Shit About Me?

I found a lost friend, and nothing has been the same.

First, Chioma died. Then Lizzy too. I was close to both of them in different ways, and years after their death I have wondered what could have been if they lived. Every milestone I hit came with the inevitable question of what it might have meant to each of these people had they been alive. Where would we have been in each other’s lives?

Enter Winnie. Great friend. She somehow tiptoed her way past my communication deficiencies to become a friend with whom I shared banal details of my day. You might even say we flirted with intimacy. Then one day, she said goodnight on WhatsApp and never came back online. WhatsApp was the only place we connected because she had deactivated all other social media accounts, so when she didn’t come back online it meant that I lost access to her forever. And so, like Chioma, like Lizzy, like Winnie.

But you see, I had some closure with Chioma and Lizzy, being that I was aware of their exit. Not Winnie, with whom I shared no mutual friends to ask about her. So I wandered about in the cruel uncertainty of her eventual fate. I spent the next three years searching with no luck, and then I assumed the worst because it made no sense to me that she was alive and didn’t try to reconnect with me, who was much more easily accessible.

So, like with Chioma, like with Lizzy, I started to fit Winnie into important moments of my life after she vanished. I got published a couple of times and passed the bar exams, all the time wondering how much better these milestones would have felt to me if she was there to savour them with me.

Then one day a few months ago, Winnie texted me out of the blue. She was alive, she had been alive, and just didn’t see a need to reach out. We had our great reunion and quickly re-established connections, and for a moment it felt very much like the universe was trying to compensate for taking Chioma and Lizzy away from me by returning Winnie to me.

We did great for a couple of days, me and Winnie, catching up and shit. Then almost abruptly, we stopped talking. We have not had a conversation in three months and have now become casual status viewers on each other's WhatsApp.

Sad, but immensely insightful. I spent all those years fantasizing about a single possibility—if Winnie were here we would have been tight. I never once considered the possibility that maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe we might have outgrown the friendship and taken different paths to the fulfilment of our distinct lives. Maybe her absence in my world made me exaggerate the relationship between us. I have spent all of those years remembering our conversations very fondly, and I can still remember the specifics of some of them. Three years passed without me seeing any photos of her yet I could accurately draw the outline of her face in my mind. I knew the parts of her face that creased when she smiled, and I related her diastema to everyone I met who had the same. Once, I met a girl in court. Her name was Sharon, and like Winnie, she was Mangu, an ethnic group domiciled in Plateau state. Like Winnie, she was moon-faced and had a gap between her teeth. So I waited behind after my session to become friends with her because I was trying to fill a Winnie-shaped hole in my heart. It didn’t work out because she was no photographer. She didn’t like my stories as much as Winnie would. She was no Winnie.

But when Winnie eventually showed up, she too, was no Winnie anymore. And this was all I needed to finally let go of Chioma and Lizzy, because I finally realised how death had mystified my relationship with these people. As if we would have lasted forever if they were alive. As if my propensity to fuck things up would not have gotten in the way of things. As if they were perfect and would have treated me in the way that I would want to be treated, consistently, for 10 years on.

There are moments when I think about Winnie and get mad at how freely she’s living without giving some recourse to the emotional turmoil her disappearance caused me. How couldn’t she have known? But then again, how could she?

More importantly, I now wonder if Chioma and Lizzie, whose memories I have coveted with so much affection, have remembered me with the same fondness in an afterlife where spirits are sentient enough to retain sentimental attachments to the people they left behind.

As I moved out of Abuja, I remembered how much I thought it would mean to me to still be in touch with Winifred. I used to think that I could have been able to have her come around every now and then. But as the aeroplane taxied off the runway, I could feel h—never mind. Writing this much is already too corny for comfort.

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