One year on the pill

One year. I have missed two nights, both in the week of the lawyer, and the nurse on the Aba road said two in a year is nothing, and then she said, but do not make it three, and I have not.

What has changed: nothing, in the body, which is the strange part. I expected to feel the virus, and I expected to feel the pill fighting it, and there is nothing, just a man who is a little tired in the harmattan like everyone else. The blood says undetectable four times in a row now. The nurse says I could be on this for fifty years. I said I would rather not be in Owerri for fifty years and she laughed, which is the first time I have made her laugh.

What has changed in the mirror: I look at myself differently, and it is not what people would guess. I do not see a sick man. I see a man who has a secret that is, for once, entirely under his own control. One bottle, one card, one hour a night. Nobody in Owerri can take that from me. It is the first thing in my life I have owned outright.

The file on the phone has forty pages. Mama asked what I am always typing and I said a book and she said about what and I said about us and she said, hm, and went back to her pot, and did not tell me to stop.