Petrichor.
That’s the word he used—the one he called the scent you said you perceived outside. The scent of rain, soil–the one curling into your nose right now.
“I can swear,” you began. “Swear?” you remember, he said, interrupting you as always. His head had tilted slightly to the right.
You remember how the light bounced off the tiny golden hoop earring in his left ear, how his taupe-coloured eyes twinkled, how his cold fingers traced wet lines on your cheekbones.
You watched sweat trail down the side of the Cold Stone ice cream paper cup—the one beside the packet of testosterone pills he purchased at the pharmacy before you arrived. Despite leaving the house thirty minutes earlier, you were ten minutes late, thanks to Lagos’s never-ending gridlock. He didn’t mention your lateness, but you saw his eye glance at his watch when you walked in. He could annoy you in a million ways, like how you were a bit pissed that he ordered before you came in.
But what he wasn’t–what he never was–was tardy. You once joked that if the rapture were a thing, if indeed the blast of a trumpet by the archangel of the homophobic god whose name was also ‘love’ could make people become human magnets- an irony you are yet to understand. He would be amongst the first to be caught up in the clouds, one of the first to arrive at the pearly gates.
“If the angels are half as pretty as you are, Omalicha Nwa, you bet I would,” he replied.
You remember how he bit his lip and did that annoying hip swing while locking you in place with his mesmerising gaze. At that moment, you knew he could trade eternity for you. You could wager that, for you, he would catch a grenade, hijack a plane, take a bullet in the brain, or whatever Bruno Mars said in Grenade. And you knew that you could do the same for him.
But you let the yinmu and “better washing” slide out of your lips. You even accompanied it with an eye roll; playful deflection was your love language. You had yet to master the ability to reciprocate love. Perhaps affection wouldn’t have been strange to you if you had grown up in a household where “I love you” was used as often as “I pray you remain rapturable.”
You remember the earliest days of your relationship when such action would have attracted a frown and a reprimand. But you both had outgrown that part of your lives. In the last eighteen months you had both shed those old skins of judgments and grown into new ones.
So, that day, in the matchbox flat on Bode Thomas, Surulere, you smiled so hard your cheeks hurt when he flapped his hand like a big bird as he drifted towards you. There and then, you could tell that the flutters in your belly belonged to a thousand giant monarch butterflies.
You wished you had flapped your arms and ran towards him, too. You wish you had succumbed to the prompts of your heart and pretended to be a goofy goose. Instead, you side-stepped him just before he got to you. You wanted him to chase you.
If you knew then that time was already ticking, you would have let him hold you for all the minutes you allowed him to chase you around the frayed pink couch. You would not have done small shakara.
At the Coldstone outlet four days ago, you wanted to tell him to use a spoon like every normal person. The perfectionist in you wanted everything to be perfect. You would have added, “for once, Somto” to get his attention, but the dimple that formed on his right cheek when he smiled distracted you from the faux pas, as always. It was easy for him to sway your emotions and change your mind without effort. And sometimes you wondered if it had anything to do with you loving him more than he loved you. You wish you knew the answer to this or to anything at all. You cannot remember if you knew someone who once said their partner annoys them as much as they amuse them.
Or maybe you heard it in one of the Agony Aunty segments of Jola and Feyikemi’s I Said What I Said podcast. You don’t know which.
Right now, your head feels like those refuse heaps stacked beside gutters in shop fronts on Thursday sanitation days; your head feels like a mix of mess.
To be candid, on some days, you didn’t even bother about his ice cream habits or any of his quirks in public. Why should you? You once dated a girl who drank beer straight from the bottle. An old-time girlfriend preferred slurping her palm wine from the calabash; you’ve had your fair share of weird drinkers and wack lovers. You have kissed a hundred frogs before your prince came along. But Somto was the only person you knew who ate ice cream directly from the cup. Spoons and spades be damned, he would say.
You don’t know why the memories are tumbling in; why every moment you shared is coming back to you, but right now, you remember the dust, nylon, and paper swirling outside the glass. You remember the ‘E’ missing from the ‘Cold Stone’ inscribed on the glass.
“Swear about what, my sweet love?” he asked. Your faces were so close you could see the pebble-like smoothness of the mole on his lip. So close in that public space that throbbed with strangers’ laughter, chatter, and patter of feet. So close that you were covered in the haze of caramel, frozen yoghurt, Oreos—and that scent you are wearing now. The cologne he left in your house. The empty bottle that best describes how you feel.
“That you’re the only one that knows this word in this place,” you answered him. Your index finger–the one with the black chipped nail paint and the matching tattoo of a half heart–traced a halo in the space above your head. You didn’t care then that it was a preposterous claim.
In a room with men in nice suits and women in colourful chic office dresses. You didn’t mind that you were in Lagos’s Silicon Valley: Yaba, where your love story began. It didn’t matter how preposterous it was that you thought Somto was the only one who knew the word for the scent of rain. That both of you were in love or even sharing that same space was considered unthinkable by many. Even in 2024.
Ayobami Adebayo’s “Stay with Me” was what brought you together. So much for a love story. Movies were your thing, so when you picked up the book on that green plastic table crusted with leftover Egusi and porridge beans in the crowded cafeteria. You did what every non-reader would do: you glanced at it casually, like someone inspecting a specimen; you flipped through the pages; ran a finger over the spine and made a comment when you saw the title. The newness of the book and boredom were what attracted you initially; you didn’t see the title till you flipped the book over.
“So, she didn’t have any title for her book other than Sam Smith’s song?”
“And who said ‘Stay With Me’ was exclusive to Sam Smith? The voice that answered you made you jerk your head upwards. Something about the voice made you look twice at the person. Beneath the hoodie and behind the dark Ray Bans, you could tell that whoever they were, they were not like everyone. They would never be like everyone. That’s how you met. It didn’t surprise you when he told you of his pills and potion on your first date two days later.
“Potion?” you curled an eyebrow at him. “I’ve known that I was different since I was a child. He shrugged, and you witnessed him biting into ice cream. You watched him eating ice cream from a bowl for the first time. You had your deal breakers, and such a quirk as his was one of them, but as you watched him, you drew a faint line over it. That would be the first of many compromises.
“You know if you didn’t tell me that you were…” You drew spirals in the air because the word was still too heavy to pronounce. You were still in a daze, wrapped in a cloud of surprise and infatuation. You were not a stranger to queer relationships. You have always found the minds and bodies of women more appealing than men’s. At first, you thought it was a form of rebellion against your spooky evangelist parents. Eventually, you realised that it was what it was—you were a girl who loved girls more.
“A trans man… A guy, man?” he replied in his raspy voice, a result of smoking two packets of Benson Switch daily. Your body tensed, and the Oreo in your mouth tasted like chalk. Your eyebrows must have shot into your hair when you reacted. He waved your fears away with a flick of his head. That was when you fell in love completely with him. A few days later, while your belongings were still folded in your big Echolac box pushed against the wall of your room, you kissed for the first time.
Stay with Me was the first book you completed without being forced or cajoled. Nikki May’s Wahala was the next. You became a reader after that day. He became a podcast listener afterwards. You both agreed that it was a fair trade.
***
Pain shoots up your palm as the gravel in the black soil bunched in your hands pushes against your skin. But that pain is nothing compared to the one in your chest. It is a drop of water to the ocean, a speck of dust to the sand in the Sahara Desert. If you had known that the ice cream date was your last day together, you would have stayed there forever. Fused to that uncomfortable, gaudy wooden chair, stuck on it like an old bubble gum.
Your eyes are pressed shut. So tight it feels as though the bones of your eye sockets are touching. A sound that can pass for a muffled groan and stifled moan ricochets in your head and chest. You want to let the light in, but to let in the light, you will also be letting in the dark. If you do, you will see the tombstone and the lies—‘beloved daughter’ etched in neat block letters.
If you open your eyes, you will see the footprints of the ones who never accepted him on the freshly dug soil. The ones he shared nothing with but a last name. The ones who had hurriedly dumped ‘the family’s embarrassment’ into a final resting place. Their excuse—according to the blog—according to religious rites.
Somto was no daughter even before he began taking the testosterone pills. Neither was he loved. You had screamed this when you first saw the concrete tombstone. You pounded your rage into the dark earth. As though you wanted to dig your way to him.
Until you heard the cough. It belonged to the guard who had let you in. It and the smell of his sweat-stained body in the worn faded overalls. Together they pulled you back from that brink. Even if you wanted to go on, you couldn’t. The way the guard glared at you made you realise he didn’t believe your story about being a relative who arrived late for the internment. You knew he would have called to confirm if he had Somto’s parents’ contact..
The way he snatched the one thousand naira note from you when you came in showed that he was tired of the throng of visitors for the day, but he would not turn down your gift. Or any other.
When you turned to face him, you had to swallow your grief.
If Somto were here, he would tell you that the guard was more of a receiver than a giver. Straight people! He would say. That’s how he sometimes saw the world: Straight. Queer. Good. Bad. But you understood because sometimes trauma can affect one’s worldview. The people he always called bad never disappointed. The good ones, too. He knew so much about the human condition that you had begun to think it was a gift because only gifts are that perfect.
How come the gift failed? Why didn’t he know that the stranger on Tinder was a killer?
It was a question you had asked yourself a hundred times. Even if you knew that there would be no answer. Not even a lie masked as one.
Behind your lids, a shadow settles, and a blanket of cold air settles on your skin. The former, you would have been scared to be alone in this place with crumbling tombstones, gleaming granite, and Gone-Too-Soon’s. This place with gnarled tree trunks and wilting flowers.
This vast expanse of land with its ominous mounds and the smell of decay. But you don’t feel anything. You’re not different from the residents of this place—people who once lived, people who no longer feel.
So, you press your eyelids tighter as the gravel burrows deeper into your palm. As your knees sink deeper into the soil. The iron fist tightens around your heart and throat. Your chest heaves as you drag in the glue formed in your lungs. You have asked yourself if the tightness in your chest would have been lighter. You want to know if you would have felt better. If the memories of the day you mentioned those words to him did not constantly dart around like bats chased from a tree.
“Let’s see other people … if that will make you happy,” you had said, even if you knew you couldn’t see anyone else. You wouldn’t. You would rather be a hermit, a worm under a rock, than be with another. But you said it. And meant it. Because love for you has always been what Oprah once said: it is being your best when the other is being their worst. And that was the best thing you could think of after he confessed to the affair. The best was what you always wanted for him.
You would see the news feature on your phone if you open your eyes. ‘Transman Stabbed to Death.’
Over two decades of his wondrous existence is summarised in four words; his eventful life is limited to one sentence. Even though you had spent hours replying to every vile comment online, telling people to fuck off and directing the keyboard warriors to their choice places in hell. You still can’t believe that it has happened. You want the unreturned phone calls to be another of his pranks. Your ears are pricked for the beep announcing an incoming text; notifying you that he is back; that this was all a bad dream. But you only hear the dull thud of rainwater on the soil. And that smell: Petrichor.
OBADITAN OLUWAKOREDE (OBA.T.K) is an independent writer whose childhood memories consist of sitting beside his father’s beaten box, devouring almost every book in the African Writers Series. In those nascent moments, he discovered the power of stories to grip and groom. But it wasn’t until his twenties, after meeting his mentor, that he discovered how to wield and weave stories. His writing is vivid and vibrant, exploring stories never told or amplifying the ones quietly told. He lives in Space, but he can be found in Lagos, Nigeria. He can be reached on 08026893106 and on Twitter(X) @KingofKontent.