Invisible
Everyone in Owerri now knows, or knows someone who knows. On what it is to be seen and unseen in the same street.
I had thought that after the afternoon there would be nothing left to hide, and that this would be, in a terrible way, a relief. That is not how it works. What happens is that the whole city knows a version, and you are still hiding, only now you are hiding from people who already know, which is a stranger job than the old one.
The choir master looks through me at the market. Two of the aunties who used to ask about the girl in Port Harcourt now cross the road, and one of them, I saw it, made the sign against the evil eye. A boy I do not know said the word at me from a keke, cheerfully, the way you would say a nickname.
And also: the woman under the umbrella on the stadium road, who has sold me a hundred Fantas, gave me one today and would not take the money, and said, my son, God is not a man. I do not know what she meant. I have thought about it all evening. I think she meant that God does not have a pastor's opinions.
So I am both. Invisible, in the sense that I have been removed from every list I used to be on. And visible, in the sense that a whole city has an opinion of my body. I am writing this from the room by the stadium, with the notebook on my knee, and E. asleep, and the woman's Fanta empty on the floor, and I am, against every expectation, still here.