STORY, STORY
I always wondered what a dead girl’s handwriting would look like.
Maybe shaky.
Maybe peaceful.
Maybe like someone who finally dropped a heavy load by the roadside and walked away without looking back.
This is mine.
My handwriting is calm today because the war is over. The girl who carried it did not survive it.
My name is Chiamaka.
First daughter of Ejike and Uloma, born into a house that believed silence was discipline and endurance was love. A house where obedience mattered more than truth and appearances were everything.
If you are reading this, Mummy, Daddy, anybody at all, please understand that I am not writing to accuse you. I am not writing to drag names or throw stones at graves.
I am writing so I don’t forget myself.
Because for twenty-one years, nobody remembered me properly.
We were a middle-class family in Lagos. My father sold motorcycle spare parts and believed hard work solved everything. My mother was sharp-tongued, loud, prayerful when she remembered, and convinced that a good child was a quiet child. We went to church when we could. We laughed loudly at family gatherings. We welcomed people into our home easily.
Too easily.
I had a younger sister, Ifeoma, loud, stubborn, full of questions and complaints. She was the type that could argue with teachers and still sleep well at night. I had a younger brother, Ikem, the last born, soft, protected, forgiven even before he offended.
I was the helper.
The watcher.
The one who learned early that love was something you earned by being useful.
The first memory that lives in my chest like a rock happened when I was six.
NEPA had taken light. The whole house was sweating. I lay on the bed in my Mickey Mouse nightie, fanning myself with torn cardboard, waiting for sleep that refused to come. My parents were in the sitting room talking, their voices blending with the noise of the generator outside.
The door opened and he walked in almost in a hurry.
He sat beside me on the bed and said my name slowly, softly, like it belonged to him.
“Chi Chi.”
His hand was rough. It smelled of kiakia and Maggi. It touched my thigh first.
I froze.
The way you freeze when harmattan air hits your nose without warning. I did not understand what was happening, but my body understood enough to be afraid.
“Chi Chi, you’re a big girl now, shebi you know?”
I looked at him in confusion, genuinely confused, because I did not understand why his body was reacting the way it was, why something was poking me, why my skin suddenly felt wrong.
That night, I told you.
I ran to you, tears and mucus mixing on my face, words tripping over themselves.
“Mummy, Uncle touched my bumbum”
You did not even look up from the onions you were slicing.
“Chiamaka, stop saying nonsense,” you said. “You don dey learn bad thing abi?”
You dragged me into the bathroom, forced my legs apart, checked me like you were inspecting tomatoes in the market.
It was the fear in your eyes that broke me.
Not fear for me.
Fear that I might embarrass you.
“Tufia,” you said. “If I hear this nonsense again, I will grind pepper and pour it inside your bum bum.”
Our house became a temporary camp for strangers you called helpers. One left, another came. Some were wicked, some careless, some simply indifferent.
And some were shadows.
People who touched you when nobody was looking and pretended nothing happened when morning came.
I learned to sleep lightly. To listen for footsteps. To understand silence as survival.
One afternoon, when I was nine, one maid, Ngozi entered my room while i was reading a novel. She locked the door gently, like she didn’t want to wake the house. I remember asking her why we couldn’t leave it open. She pressed her body against mine, her breath hot in my ear. She had this weird smell like burnt beans.
“Don’t worry, come and sit down” she said smiling softly.
Her voice sounded playful, like she was calling me to watch TV. She touched my shoulder first, then my arm, her fingers lingering too long, moving in a way that made my skin crawl.
“See as you don de big,” she said as she touched my orange seed boobs “You’re not a baby again.”
I shifted away instinctively, confused and scared.
“I want to go outside,” I said.
She smiled, but her eyes were hard. She leaned closer and lowered her voice.
“If you tell anybody,” she whispered, “I will tell your mummy say you and Emma dey do bad thing.”
My heart stopped.
I didn’t even know what she meant, but I knew it sounded dirty. Dangerous. Like something that would make my mother angry.
“You hear me?” she asked.
I nodded.
She unlocked the door and went back to her work like nothing had happened.
By ten, I had mastered silence.
By thirteen, I had mastered lying.
A calm lie. A gentle one. The kind that rolled off the tongue smoothly.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Anything wrong?”
“No.”
“Hope nobody touched you?”
“Never.”
I became the smiling girl with the empty chest. The peace-maker. The one who understood everybody’s moods. The big sister who packed lunches, supervised homework, mediated fights, and swallowed her own pain so the house could breathe.
Every year, something inside me died small small.
A little trust.
A little anger.
A little voice.
By the time I got to university, only the body was alive. The girl inside had already packed her things.
I studied, laughed, posted pictures, made jokes, passed exams. I looked like someone who was doing well. But inside me was a graveyard of versions of myself that nobody noticed were missing.
This diary is not my goodbye.
It is my resurrection.
Because dead girls who come back do not come back soft. They come back with memory. With clarity. With hunger for truth.
I will tell you how I finally died.
And I will tell you how I came back.
Just not yet.
This is only the beginning.
