The first page
Why I am starting a notebook I will have to hide, and where I am hiding it.
I bought this notebook at the stationery shop by the junction for a hundred naira and I have already decided where it lives: under the mattress, on the wall side, where Charles does not go. If anyone finds it I will say it is for school. It is not for school.
I am starting it because there is a sentence in my head that I have never said and never written, and I have begun to think that if I do not put it somewhere it will do something to me from the inside. I am not going to write it today either. Today I am only writing that there is a sentence.
It rained last night, out of season, and this morning the whole of Obinze smelled of wet dust and the generator next door was already going. Mama was singing in the kitchen. Papa left before six. Francis is back in Enugu. Eudora has exams. Charles wanted to play football and I said later, and he said you always say later, and he is right.
Nineteen years old. Church twice tomorrow. I am going to write in here on Sundays, after the second service, when nobody is looking at me any more.