CHAPTER ELEVENTH-NAMING THINGS(KEMI)
504 Words
Therapy was not gentle,
It didn’t soothe or wrap my mistakes in language like healing,
It dismantled me.
The first session felt like confession.
The second felt like interrogation.
By the third, I realized something worse, it was clarity.
Dr. Bello never raised her voice.
She simply waited.
Silence stretched until I filled it.
“I was lonely,” I said.
She nodded. “Loneliness explains behavior. It doesn’t excuse it
“I loved him.”
Or you loved how you felt with him?
I hated how precise she was.
Every time I tried to romanticize what happened, she stripped it back to anatomy.
“It wasn’t destiny,” she said once. “It was proximity and unmet needs.”
The words stung more than any insult.
Proximity,
Needs,
So clinical,
She named my patterns
Emotional dependency,
You didn’t choose Tosin, she said. “You chose escape.”
That sentence followed me home like a ghost.
Outside those rooms, Kunle moved through the house like a man finishing a chapter he had already decided to end.
He didn’t shout.
Didn’t accuse.
Didn’t ask where I went.
He simply stopped existing beside me ,
He slept turned away,
A careful distance, even in bed.
He no longer touched me not by accident, not out of habit, not even when passing me plates at dinner.
Our marriage ended without announcement.
Silence replaced intimacy the way dust replaces abandoned furniture.
Some nights I wanted him to scream.
Anger would have meant he still felt something.
But Kunle practiced discipline.
He reduced me to logistics
“Driver paid?”
“Yes.”
“Meeting tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
Nothing else.
No my love.
No how are you.
Just efficiency.
I realized something terrifying
Being hated is still being seen,
Being ignored is erasure.
At work, the auditors arrived.
Quiet people with neutral faces and careful questions.
They spoke softly, but their files were heavy.
Transfers.
Approvals.
Access points.
Patterns formed faster than explanations.
My credentials.
Tosin’s terminal.
Dates lining up like accusations.
I confessed to what I could bear.
The affair.
The negligence.
The misplaced trust.
I told myself I was being honest.
But honesty is selective when survival is involved.
I did not protect Tosin.
Fear edits faster than love.
The day the divorce papers arrived, I wasn’t surprised.
I had rehearsed it in my mind for months.
Kunle placed the envelope on the dining table like a receipt.
No speech.
No drama.
Just paper.
He signed first.
His pen didn’t hesitate.
Didn’t tremble.
He didn’t look at me.
I signed next
My name looked unfamiliar.
Like I was authorizing the closure of an account I had overdrawn years ago.
That was it.
No last conversation,
No goodbye
Silence was how our marriage ended.
Not with cruelty.
Not with confrontation,
Just quiet finality.
After he left, the house felt larger.
Colder.
Echoing.
For the first time, I understood something therapy couldn’t soften,
I hadn’t lost two men.
I had lost myself first,
There were only consequences.
- Writer
