I carried two burdens, each heavy enough to crush me. One was mine. One belonged to my mother. Together, they made it impossible to stand straight.
The first burden—my own—was who I was. It had started long before anyone noticed, before the whispers, before the black car. It was the truth I could not pray away, no matter how many nights I bent my knees, pleading for a life that felt normal, for a heart that beat like everyone else’s.
I tried to conform. I studied the girls at school, memorizing the angles of their faces, the sway of their hair, the rhythm of their laughter. I told myself this was what I should want. But the body does not lie. The body only knows itself. And mine had always known something different.
By fourteen, I had stopped asking God for help. If God had made me this way, then either He was cruel—or He simply didn’t care. It was easier to stop praying than to keep begging for a miracle that would never come.
The second burden—my mother’s secret—was heavier still.
After the cassette, after I had seen what she was doing, that knowledge lodged in my chest like a stone. Some days it pressed so hard I could not draw a full breath. I saw things no son should ever see: the positions, the men’s faces, the rooms that smelled like money and shame. And I knew—it was because of me. My existence, my secret, my body… had led her here.
No one could know. The neighbors whispered, the classmates laughed, and the pastor condemned. I was alone. And the silence was worse than the truth.
School became a battlefield.
Before the whispers, invisibility had been a small mercy. Now, the world saw me, and seeing was dangerous. Notes on my desk, insults shouted in hallways, menacing glares following me through the compound—all reminders that my life was no longer mine.
One afternoon, I found a photograph tucked into my locker: my mother, captured in a moment I could barely comprehend. My hands shook. I held it behind the school, over the flames of the groundskeeper’s fire, and watched it curl and blacken. But the image remained inside me, engraved where fire could not reach.
Obinna became my tormentor.
The older boy, twice my size, cruel in ways I could not name, cornered me behind the market one day with three friends, each taller, heavier, grinning like predators.
“Ifechi,” he said. “Son of a porn star.”
The words hit me like stones. I said nothing. My eyes stayed on the ground. My heart was a drum of fear.
Then he stepped closer, mocking, “Your mother… she’s busy tonight, I hear. Very talented, they say.”
Something inside me snapped. I struck him, a single, desperate blow, fueled by eleven years of rage and shame. For one fleeting moment, I felt alive. But the reprieve was brief. They beat me—fists, boots, laughter echoing in my ribs—and left me bleeding in the dust. I rose eventually, cursed and bruised, and returned home alone.
My mother was never there. Not for the wounds, not for the small mercies, not for the child left behind by fear and survival.
I withdrew from school.
Days bled into one another in the compound. I read discarded books, taught myself what I could, built a sanctuary of knowledge in a world that offered none. I prepared myself for something I could not name—escape, death, or the faint hope that life might someday soften.
The whispers never stopped.
They seeped through the walls, the market, the air itself:
“That boy is cursed.”
“His mother is a prostitute, the expensive kind.”
“He is the same. Born wrong. Punished by God.”
Pain became permanent, familiar as my own heartbeat. I learned to breathe it, carry it, let it shape me.
Then came small, unexpected kindness.
A boy named Samuel in the market—gentle, quiet, older than me by a year—once gave me a phone charger. “You look like you need something good today,” he said.
I held it like a relic, staring at him as if he had spoken another language. It was the first hint that light still existed, even in Owerri. Yet I never spoke to him again, too afraid that any closeness could unravel the fragile walls I had built around my secrets.
I tried to end it once.
I will not describe how. I will not give directions. Only this: I stood at the edge of nothing, staring down into it, thinking of my mother. Thinking of what she carried. I stepped back.
Not because hope had returned. Not because life was suddenly kind. But because I could not add my death to her burden. The cruel mathematics of love dictated that she could not die for me, and I could not die for her. So we remained, two prisoners in a single house, bound by silence, secrets, and survival.
At night, I listened to her return.
The black car would pull up. The door would open, close. Her footsteps shuffling across the compound. I lay on my mat, pretending to sleep, hearing her washing in the bucket, hearing her trying to scrub away a life built on shame and necessity.
Sometimes, she cried. Softly, almost imperceptibly. I heard her. I did not move. I could not. Words never came between us anymore. Only silence. Only the distance of two souls, each trapped in the same prison.
Two secrets. Two prisons. One room. One life.
